Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Here's a mini review of THE DEVIL WITH HITLER, from the rare TCM showing last Monday. The Hal Roach-UA movie tops out at 43 short minutes and is in general a purposely non-PC opportunity to let wartime audiences have an easy laugh at our Axis of enemies -- the old axis, the one that invaded other countries. The show plays like an extended Three Stooges short, with caricatures ripped off from Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR. Bobby Watson does a good Hitler impersonation, actually halfway between Adolf and Moe Howard. Joe Devlin's Mussolini is firmly based on Jack Oakie's lampoon in the Chaplin film. George E. Stone is an unconvincing (even for a gross stereotype) buck-toothed generic Japanese diplomat named Suki Yaki. He's probably meant to represent one of the 'treacherous' envoys that delivered Japan's declaration of war a couple of hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The plot is a fairly formless succession of gags ribbing Hitler as a lousy painter and showing the three villains' attempts to assassinate each other with bombs. Douglas Fowley is a frustrated life insurance saleman who books three policies with the bad guys (all on each other) but is turned down by Lloyd's of London with an offhand "Are you kidding?" Holding the picture together is a rather suave Alan Mowbray as Satan. He's going to lose his job in Hell to Hitler ("He's better qualified!") and is sent to Earth to try and get Adolf to do one good deed. The film's only point is that Hitler is a complete stinker and should be banished to Hell at the earliest opportunity, and THE DEVIL WITH HITLER gave its audiences license to have a raucous laugh at his expense. The film's supposedly ribald humor turned out to be one sound-alike "I lost my Ass!" pun, and Hitler showing that he can paint "changing hands without missing a stroke." I guess I wasn't sufficiently crude to get that last one without having it explained to me.

With Forest Whittaker's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND getting rave reviews (even from picky Savant confidante Gary Teetzel), Criterion wants us to remember that Barbet Schroeder's chilling first-person docu on the real GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA is still in print. Savant's 2002 review is here. Thanks for reading! Glenn Erickson