In this fantasy, Baron Münchhausen is an immortal whose travels through time and space are recounted in a series of flashbacks.
This 1943 film is exceptional in several ways:
First, it is a technical masterpiece. The sets and the color photography are as good as or better than any films from the same era being produced in Britain or the USA, including even The Wizard of Oz and The Thief of Baghdad. The recently remastered 4K version is spectacular.
Second, it was begun at the height of Nazi Germany’s military successes, ordered by Joseph Goebbels himself. It was written by a Jewish man, Erich Kästner, but his name was banned from the credits.
Third, the Arabian portion of the film contains nudity, in an era when naked flesh was verboten across the Atlantic. Here is the relevant portion of the film. Sample capture below.
The film’s premiere in March 1943 ran 134 minutes. A re-censored version was released just three months later with a runtime of 118 minutes, with changes presumably ordered by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda to expunge controversial aspects of the film. The restored 4K “export version” (available for free here) is shorter still, running 116 minutes. The German Blu-Ray has all three versions (134 premiere, 118 later theatrical, 116 export version). I have not seen the longer versions and don’t know what is in the other 18 minutes.
If anyone has seen the premiere version, please tell the rest of us what the differences are.
Remarkable! And a far cry from Terry Gilliam’s version and had almost no nudity, aside from a quick nip-slip from (cough-17-year-old-cough) Uma Thurman.
Apparently Gilliam was required to add a disclaimer to the end of his film “This is a new motion picture. This motion picture is not to be confused with the UFA/Transit/Murnau 1942/43 motion picture bearing the title ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’.”
Apparently the Murnau Foundation, which was still around in 1990, threatened to sue over an unauthorized re-make.
I think the Basterds might have tried to go to the premiere.
I always thought Nazis were generally okay with nudity. Well, didn’t Hitler commision Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia which included a shit ton of nudity in the opening sequence?
Thanks for the info. The film looks great and I’m always interested in nudity or near nudity in the early days of cinema especially during the Pre-code era. Have you seen Wild Girl with Joan Bennett? She actually showed some quick side boob in there. I’m surprised those haven’t been wildly circulated since she has a huge cult following because of Dark Shadows.
It doesn’t seem the writer Erich Kästner was Jewish according to his wikipedia. He was a liberal pacifist therefore not fond of Nazis and they not of him. Another instance of nudity I know in Nazi era movies was in the antisemitic propaganda film “Jud Suss”. It happens during a parade scene towards the beginning when a womans shirt gets ripped exposing her breasts. It is completely random and for comedic effect, strange considering the type of movie it is.
Archive.org has an archive of German movies from that era – – and I am sure there are more scenes not documented on the internet.
The director Leni Riefenstahl herself appeared topless in a Wiemar era movie called “Ways to Strength and Beauty” which features numerous nude scenes. She did not direct it but only appeared in it.
It is odd that such a movie would be made by the Germans at the height of the war. Maybe they wanted to convey a veneer of ‘normalcy’ even as they engineered the slaughter of so many people. Thanks to Scoop for info about this historical matter.
All nations have wanted movies to be made during wars as a way of getting their propaganda out. I have no idea if this film was approved by the Nazis, but the US govt wanted many in Hollywood to keep making films instead of fighting as they thought it would be a better way to help the war effort. And for much of the war, the Germans were doing pretty well so they certainly wanted to put out an ‘everything is going great’ mentality.
The Internet Archive (archive.org) has a 116 min version so I guess that is the export version. It does contain the nude scene of the women shown above just after the 1 hour 11 minute mark.
That’s the one linked in the post.
Excellent find, Herr Scoop…