John Anderson‘s 12.21 Washington Post piece about the difficulty of selling nice Nazis reminded me of Marlon Brando‘s Christian Diestl in The Young Lions. It’s a 1950s “sell” job, all right — a sanded-down, somewhat romanticized but still tolerable idea of what a decent WWII German soldier might be like, one who believes at first in National Socialism and later not so much. But I like this scene for the quiet conviction Brando brings to the words “I would do it.” This scene isn’t bad either.
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