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YES. The caps for unequivocally. And Werner Herzog obviously agreed, since he made them.
The one man is Dieter Dengler, with a story so improbable that Hollywood would never have considered it, leaving it to the man who considers so many improbable stories, from a year following a trapper in Siberia’s taiga to the oil field fires in Kuwait, post-Saddam’s visit of 1991, put to classic music. And there is so much more, including the ever-so-haunting tale of a medieval German village that lost the means of making a livelihood, the secret of making red glass.
Dieter was born in Germany in 1938. Herzog in 1942. They had similar childhoods of a losing war and scraping by in the post-war rubble. In Dengler’s case, he was old enough to remember seeing an American pilot coming in low, making eye contact with him, as he bombed Dengler’s village in the Black Forest. And that is when “Little Dieter” vowed he would fly, a vow he fulfilled and would continue almost to his final days.
“Little Dieter Learns to Fly” is the documentary which was released in 1997. Dieter plays himself. They go back to Laos where he was once held captive. I watched and reviewed the movie in 2019.
Herzog lets the story simmer for a decade and then decides a fictional account also needed to be told. He released “Rescue Dawn” in 2007. Christian Bale admirably plays Dengler and Steve Zahn plays Duane, his companion after the prison escape. (In checking Wikipedia, it should be noted that Dengler died between these movies, in 2001, at a youthful 62. Though he had eluded death many times, it finally wanted him. He was diagnosed with ALS [Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis], also known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Dengler decided to hasten the process and meet death on his own terms.)
Dengler is flying a prop plane off the USS Ranger in the Gulf of Tonkin. It is his first mission. He is bombing in Laos, which is a secret, not to the people being bombed, but to the American public. He is shot down, survives the crash (he did not bale), is captured and taken prisoner. When he arrives in the rural, mostly open-air prison, his fellow prisoners ask him about the baseball games. Herzog included this jarring detail and I wonder if he incorporated it from the story told by Wilfred Burchett, the Australian communist journalist who was given access by the Vietnamese to American prisoners. Burchett says in his account, “Vietnam – Inside Story of a Guerilla War,” issued in 1965, that the first thing the American prisoners asked about was the baseball standings.
Herzog maintains high dramatic tension as Dengler plans and executes the escape. It all seemed most realistic, with a few anachronisms that the trivia section informs the viewer of. But imagine, twice in one’s life, in two very different wars, having to lick the glue off of labels for nourishment. Well, we know Dengler made it, so I’m not giving that away. Ah, but the leaches et al., and lack of food, until the real life “deus ex machina,” the helicopters arrive.
Another impressive Herzog movie about another impressive German. 5-stars.
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Director Werner Herzog speaks about making "Rescue Dawn"
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This CD doesn’t work. (USA)
Disappointed.Luckily Pajamazon refunded me my $$$ otherwise I’d be venting here.
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Bridget -Oshawa Canada
Prefer the couch & no one talking!
Reviewed in Canada on March 12, 2023