I have always admired Marlon Brando's turn in "The Young Lions", as a man who is patriotic to a point but becomes disillusioned
about his country (and just about everything else). Of course, the one requisite for any such sympathetic character is that he not be a virulent Nazi. His concern for his Nazi commandant (Maximillian Schell) is part of what humanizes him (when he leaves the Colonel a bayonet with which to commit suicide).
It took Bernardo Bertolucci to make a fascist sympathetic: Clerici in The Conformist
"For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us" Rilke's First Duino Elegy
Daniel Shaw
Professor of Philosophy and Film
Lock Haven University
Managing Editor, Film and Philosophy
website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw
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