The Counterfeiters

Although I missed the first part (as well as "Summer Palace"), tonight I saw most of the Oscar-winning foreign film winner, Austria's "The Counterfeiters," about a group of Jewish counterfeiters - led by Salomon Sorowitzch (Karl Markovics) - who lived in a "luxury suite" within a concentration camp, as long as they mass produced high quality, believeable British and U.S. bills, which the Nazis then used to pass to Swiss banks to generate more foreign currency for the war effort. Another counterfeiter, however, challenges the operation as now critical for the war effort, even though completing the orders was also very critical for keeping all of them alive (and eventually they are forging documents to help the camp commandant and his family alive in a post-Allied victory Europe). This is a reasonably short movie that picks up some of the themes of the longer "Bridge over the River Kwai" and "Schindler's List" and in some not so pro-U.S. ways reminds me of last week's "Taxi to the Dark Side." A couple of very riveting scenes during the movie's second half help make it stand out to those other movies.