Wernher von Braun (1960)

Alternate title: I Aim at the Stars: the Wernher von Braun Story.

Biopic about the pioneering rocket engineer who built the V-1 and V-2 bombs for the Nazis and, when the war ended, switched to the American side, and was responsible for the development of the American space program.

Quite ridiculous as nearly all biopics, and nevertheless I liked it sufficiently. Its bullshit is transparent for an experienced viewer (sorry for the self-compliment), rendering it ineffectual. And the film is moderately entertaining. There is an informative review by an Internet Movie Database user, which I will transcribe here. The information about availability should probably be disregarded as outdated, since I saw it on a magnificently sharp copy on cable TV.

*quote*
Wernher Von Braun: A Space Fantasty

Author: sprpick from Regina, Canada
26 February 2008

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

As Michael J. Neufeld's important new biography "Wernher Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War" demonstrates, Columbia Pictures "I Aim For The Stars" has only a passing relationship to reality.
Neufeld says that at first Von Braun was fascinated with the idea of a bio-pic when it was pitched to him by Columbia in the late '50s. He thought it would do a power of good for his ceaseless efforts to promote space travel to the American public. As production advanced, though, he realized the movie was going to draw unhealthy attention to his Nazi past and he was disenchanted by the hostile sub-text inserted by the screen-writers and director: that he was a well-meaning wimp who gave into Nazi evil.
He was no wimp, as the book shows, but he was far more involved with the Nazis than is shown in the movie.
Far from being the reluctant civilian member of the Nazis pressed into the Party late in the war, Von Braun, Neufeld says, was a sometimes uniformed member of the SS who was promoted and decorated several times.
The movie does correctly depict Von Braun being tossed into jail briefly for getting on the wrong side of Heinrich Himmler, but it probably wasn't as traumatic as this film suggests. Von Braun kept going on to bigger and better things in Germany right until the end of the war.
The movie doesn't touch at all on what was the most shameful part of Von Braun's life and career: his complicity in the atrocious treatment of slave labourers in the underground Dora rocket plant in Germany in 1944 and '45.
To this day, documentary film is frequently shown on TV of emaciated prisoners near dead but weeping in relief as they are liberated by Allied soldiers. A surprising amount of this footage was taken at Dora.
Von Braun generally disavowed any knowledge of prisoners being mistreated and executed in his rocket factories, but Neufeld suggests he actually knew quite a bit about it and felt guilty about it until the end if his life.
As Neufeld says, Von Braun loathed the movie (possibly out a guilty conscience) and tried to distance himself from it and forget the whole thing. Fortunately for Von Braun, any controversy that followed the release for "I Aim For The Stars" quickly blew over. It also helped relatively few people saw it because it was box office turkey, except in Germany where he remained a national hero.
The movie survives, although barely as a long undistributed (1992) VHS tape. I managed to see a bad dub on to DVD. And while on the whole, the movie is silly -- especially the bogus love story between the mythical British spy in Von Braun's rocket plant and an equally mythical rocket scientist "colleague" -- it is an interesting historical document that's given new currency by the Neufeld biography.
Hopefully, Columbia will see fit to re-issue it on an official DVD or at least make it available for download as that technology improves and becomes more widely available.
*unquote*

Rating: 53