Mark Schmidt's Walking With the Enemy is an oddly endearing movie -- and one that simply won't go away. The film played some film festivals two years ago and had a brief theatrical run in Arkansas in 2014. Now it's back in Little Rock and Hot Springs for another week or so. After the 4:20 p.m. screening Saturday at Little Rock's Riverdale 10, I'll conduct a question and answer session with the film's executive producer, Randy Williams.
When I reviewed the film in 2014, I was pretty careful to make a couple of points. First of all, Walking With the Enemy is an independent film, and so far as I can tell it's the only movie produced by San Diego-based Liberty Studios, a production company that means "to deliver inspirational true stories to a worldwide audience." On their website, they announce their "focus is the triumph of the human spirit over incredible odds, to celebrate outstanding individuals and their accomplishments, past and present."
I don't know whether that makes them a faith-based company or not -- that's something I guess I'll ask Williams -- but it's interesting that they're concentrating on adapting "untold true stories" into movies.
Walking With the Enemy certainly fits this template -- the story it tells is so powerful and inspiring that pointing out its flaws seems uncharitable, if not rude. So what if the production is not as sleek and seamless as a Spielbergian epic -- more important is the example put forth and the lessons we might take from it. There are more important things in life than production values.
Enemy tells the story of Elek Cohen (charismatic Irish actor Jonas Armstrong), who is based on the real Pinchas Tobor Rosenbaum, a Hungarian Jew who, near the end of World War II, escaped from a labor camp and disguised himself in the uniform of the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian fascist group aligned with Hitler. For months Rosenbaum risked his life by rounding up Jewish families, sometimes at gunpoint, and delivering them to a factory where the Swiss had established a safe house. Only when the Jews were delivered into freedom did they realize that their abductor was their savior.
The change of the character's name signals that other details have been changed as well, and so the uniform Elek puts on is not that of a relatively obscure Hungarian faction but that of a dead SS officer. And he engages in more derring-do than Rosenbaum probably did -- he's more like a superhero waging his own private war against the occupying oppressors than a low-key operative ferrying Jews to safety. Walking With the Enemy is not a movie that is afraid to embrace cliche -- people die dramatically in the arms of loved ones, time and time again Elek narrowly avoids detection (and therefore summary execution) and there are times when, in order to continue his masquerade, he must stand by while women and children are shot dead in front of his eyes.
Still, most of the acting is passable to good (though Ben Kingsley's role is smaller than you might guess from the trailer or the poster) and director Schmidt keeps things moving. Production values are generally high and the authentic locations -- much of the film was shot in Romania -- contribute to an overall sense of quality.
Walking With the Enemy is a little overreaching in that it strains for epicness. It's not as artful as Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europa, Roman Polanski's The Pianist, or Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, films to which it has been (not always favorably) compared. But if it's not the equal of these remarkable movies, it's better than most mindless Hollywood product.
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MovieStyle on 11/13/2015