Overview

Schindler's List is an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Grammy winning 1993 movie based on the book Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally, published in the United States as Schindler's List and subsequently re-issued in Commonwealth countries under that name as well. The movie, adapted by Steven Zaillian and directed by Steven Spielberg, relates the tale of Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German Catholic businessman who was instrumental in saving the lives of over one thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust. The title refers to a list of the names of 1,100 Jews whom Schindler hired to work in his factory and kept from being sent to the concentration camps.

Schindler's List is consistently ranked amongst the finest movies of all time. It is currently ranked as 9th best film by the American Film Institute [1], and, as of December 21, 2006, rated number seven on the top 250 films on the Internet Movie Database with an 8.8/10 rating.

Production

Roman Polanski was asked to direct the film. However, he passed on it, having survived the Kraków Ghetto himself. He felt it would be too personal, and would bring up too many hard memories that he was not prepared to deal with at the time. In 2002, he did direct a Holocaust-themed movie, The Pianist, which earned him an Oscar for Best Director. Martin Scorsese was another prospective director, but feeling it should be made by a Jewish director, he traded it to Spielberg in exchange for the rights to remake Cape Fear, which Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment produced. When Steven Spielberg finally signed on he refused payment for making this movie, saying that it would be like "taking blood money".

Steven Spielberg later spoke of the making of the movie as affecting him deeply.[citation needed] It is shot almost entirely in black and white (with a color prologue and epilogue, a red coat in two scenes, and color candle flames in another). It stars Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern and Ralph Fiennes as Amon Göth. The publicity for the film used the tagline "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire" (a quote from the Talmud that is featured toward the end of the film). Critically acclaimed, the film won praise for depicting — often in exceptional, graphic detail — the horrifying brutality of the Holocaust.

Nominated for twelve Academy Awards, it won seven, including the coveted Best Picture and the Best Director award for Spielberg (his first, although he had previously received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award). Composer and conductor John Williams also won the Academy Award for Original Music Score, which features violin solos by Israeli violinist Itzhak Perlman. Ralph Fiennes' performance earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. While he didn't get the Oscar, he did win the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA Award, which is the British equivalent.

Response

In the years since its release, Schindler's List has risen in status to be regarded as one of the greatest movies of the 1990s.[citation needed] It is also considered to be Steven Spielberg's greatest directorial accomplishment by many viewers and critics: the former vote it consistently among the top ten movies on the Internet Movie Database Top 250, while the latter voted it #9 in the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies series. In addition, the American Film Institute voted Liam Neeson's Schindler as the 13th greatest movie hero of all time, while Ralph Fiennes' Göth was voted the 15th greatest villain in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains series. In 2006 it was selected as the 3rd most inspiring movie of all time by AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers. In 2004, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Schindler's List was also significant in director Steven Spielberg's career. While Spielberg was at the time one of the very most recognized and profitable American directors, his popular reputation was that of a director who brought the highest level of skill and proficience to entertaining movies intended for mass consumption; see "Jaws," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.," and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." While all of the named movies were exceptional and successful[citation needed], Spielberg was identified by himself and others as a "story-teller"; he was especially effusive about "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which was a conscious recreation of the action-packed, swashbuckling movies of Spielberg's childhood. Spielberg was also criticized for a tendency towards cloying and overly sentimental endings,[citation needed] such as the last act of E.T. and the entire duration of "Always," a critical failure due to viewers' apparent uninterest in unrelenting schmaltz. When Spielberg's intention to release "Schindler's List" was first announced, many doubted whether a director of supremely entertaining but ultimately mass-market movies was wise to focus his first real attempt at serious drama around a uniquely serious event.

Spielberg responded with a film that immediately dispelled any characterization of him as a lightweight, popcorn-movie director.[citation needed] Schindler's List was instantly recognized for its clarity of focus.[citation needed] Spielberg went further than reducing his tendency towards excess: instead issuing a film almost unique in its restraint, tautness, tight editing, and unadorned, unsparing violence. A director who was feared to be incapable of gravity and drama had in fact released one of the most grave and dramatic movies in recent history.

Initial critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, as Schindler's List was widely lauded as not just a rare achievement of movie-making but a significant cultural event. The film was the first to depict the Holocaust in an unblinking, explicit fashion. In addition to its compelling dramatic themes, Schindler's List was viewed by high-school classes throughout the country to impress the horrors of the Holocaust and serve as fodder for discussion of anti-Semitic attitudes ranging from mild suspicion to overt violence. In the United States, the viewing of the movie was often presented as a form of moral obligation among both Gentiles and Jews. The movie's status among American Jews was parodied in an episode of the television program "Seinfeld," in which Jerry and his girlfriend, reunited after an absence, cannot keep their hands off each other in a theater screening Schindler's List. After his parents are informed by a treacherous witness, Jerry's mother incredulously and repeatedly asks: "You made out during *Schindler's LIST?!?*"

Heading into the 1993 Academy Awards (presented in March 1994), Schindler's List was arguably the most solid lock for Best Picture in the history of the Oscars. Academy voters often seem to enjoy defying expectations by handing the top award not to the front-runner but to a smaller movie. Just since the 1990s, see: The Silence of the Lambs, Shakespeare in Love, and Crash. Schindler's List, however, could not be denied in good conscience, winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes were nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, but did not win.

In addition, Schindler's List also featured on a number of other "best of" lists, including the Time magazine's Top Hundred as selected by critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel, Time Out magazine's 100 Greatest Films Centenary Poll conducted in 1995, Roger Ebert's "Great Movies"' series, and Leonard Maltin's "100 Must See Movies of the Century". In 1998, the American Film Institute placed Schindler's List as number 9 on its list of the 100 best movies in cinematic history. The list did not feature another movie released after 1990 until number 65, 1991's Silence of the Lambs.

As with most movies that receive such acclaim, some critics have attempted to knock Schindler's List from its pedestal. Most criticized, even among fans, was Schindler's final scene, in which he attempts to flee from the encroaching Soviet army, but breaks down upon realizing that he could have sold possessions such as his car and his gold ring in exchange for taking on more "workers" and saving their lives. The scene is conspicuously melodramatic especially as it comes on the heels of a decidedly unsentimental movie, and is often considered to be a weak point.[citation needed] Spielberg himself has acknowledged that the scene bordered on the melodramatic, but defended it by explaining that he simply felt that the movie's grimness needed to be mitigated by a heartfelt and emotional scene.

Some viewers offered a more extensive criticism of the movie; namely, that despite its graphic depiction of the Holocaust, the premise of Schindler's List was sugarcoated by relying on a story of salvation amid an event in which many more were not saved. Stanley Kubrick notably remarked that "'Schindler's List' is about 1,000 people who lived; the Holocaust is about six million people who died." Kubrick made this remark, however, while still intending to release a Holocaust-related film of his own. Supporters of Schindler's List defended the movie on the grounds that (i) despite the story of Schindler's successful protection of 1,100 Jews, the movie does not flinch from showing both the senselessness and the extent of the Nazi genocide; and (ii) it is debatable whether a movie that focused solely on the six million Jews who died could be compelling without a plot strand featuring individual characters.

Following the critical and box office success of the film, Spielberg founded and continues to finance the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization with the goal of providing an archive for the filmed testimony of as many survivors of the Holocaust as possible, so that their stories will not be lost in the future.

1997 TV controversy

On Sunday, February 23, 1997, the film was shown on television in the United States, being carried by NBC with extremely limited sponsor interruption by the Ford Motor Company. Per Spielberg's insistence, it aired unedited and uncensored. The telecast was the first ever to receive a TV-M (now TV-MA) rating under the TV Parental Guidelines that had been established at the beginning of that year.

Many fundamentalist and evangelical Christian groups, which had previously been squeamish about the movie [5], stridently objected to the film's being shown on network television at all, due to scenes of nudity, violence, and the use of vulgar language which were not edited out of the TV production. Senator Tom Coburn, then an Oklahoma congressman, stated that NBC, by airing the film, had brought television "to an all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity," adding that airing the film was an insult to "decent-minded individuals everywhere." Under fire from Democrats as well as fellow Republicans, Coburn apologized for his outrage, saying: "My intentions were good, but I've obviously made an error in judgment in how I've gone about saying what I wanted to say." He said he had reversed his opinion on airing the film, but qualified it ought to have been aired later at night, when, he said, "there are still large numbers of children watching without parental supervision." [6]

The film was re-broadcast on NBC on Sunday, March 14, 1999, with extremely limited sponsor interruption, this time by Metlife and in 2000 on some PBS stations.