THE COUNTERFEITERS

A master counterfeiter is thrown into a concentration camp by the Nazis and forced to make fake foreign currency, but will he help his evil captors or sabotage them? In Nazi-era Germany, Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is a master counterfeiter who is arrested and thrown into a concentration camp. Once his captors notice his unique skills, he's soon transported to better living conditions and asked to become a part of Operation Berhard, an extensive scheme by the Nazis to produce fake foreign currency. At first taking on the job with zeal, Sally has a crisis of conscience when his friend Adolf Burger (August Diehl) suggests that they try to undermine the German war effort rather than support it.
Chaplin, August Zirner, Marie Bäumer
Director(s) Stefan Ruzowitzky
Writer(s) Stefan Ruzowitzky
Status In theaters (limited)
Genre(s) Drama
Release Date Feb. 22, 2008
Running Time 98 minutes
Web Site sonyclassics.com/thecounterfeiters

Who's in It: Karl Markovics, August Diehl, David Striesow

The Basics: A group of criminals, artists and financiers arrested and placed in a Nazi concentration camp are forced to forge British pounds and American dollars for the Third Reich in an effort to destabilize the economies of the allied forces. In return for good work, they're allowed to live and are kept in relatively luxurious accommodations (i.e., they have food and clothes and beds with sheets).

What's the Deal? One of the more interesting developments in Holocaust-themed movies in the past couple of years has been the emergence of stories where the prisoners themselves are no saints (like the documentary Steal a Pencil for Me, about the somewhat adulterous lovers who kept in touch via clandestine letter-writing) and/or are willing to do whatever it takes to survive (like in Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, in which a woman who wouldn't have been out of place in the cast of Showgirls used what she had to get out alive, not really caring who died along the way as long as it wasn't her). No more noble Life Is Beautiful suffering, everything's darker, bleaker and probably more close to tense, complicated real life than we've been led to believe.

Based Upon: The memoir of Adolf Burger, one of the men who helped forge the money but who also presumably spent a lot of his time trying to sabotage the operation.

Weird Pedigree: From director Stefan Ruzowitzky, the man behind the not-scary-at-all German horror franchise Anatomy, as well as the loony All the Queen's Men, the one starring Matt LeBlanc, about drag-queen secret agents infiltrating the Nazis (yes, this is a real movie). It's good to see him direct something not terrible this time out.

By the Time Most of You Read This Review and Have a Chance to See It … it will already have won or lost the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. And it's got a good shot, being about WWII and all. The Academy loves that sort of thing.