Nicholas Winton - Hero of the Holocaust in Occupied Czechoslovakia - Dead at 106. Sad News.

[Matthew Hewitt]

MH: no axes to grind here. Just interested in this phrase: "fairytale version of the Holocaust" Care to say more?

I don't mean fairytale in the disparaging,"it's all make-believe" sense but rather in the way that the narrative is constructed as a fable and it's use of archetypes as characters. This is completely at odds with the pseudo-documentary surface of the film, which Spielberg lifted from the post-war European cinema of directors like Rossellini, Wajda and Pontecorvo. It's a either a deliberate and deeply cynical attempt at audience manipulation or the sign of a populist film-maker out of his depth with more 'serious' fare.

As Peter says though, that's really a discussion for another thread.