Taika Waititi follows a distinguished tradition with this ‘strange art comedy’ about a boy growing up in Nazi Germany, but fails to cut to the dark heart of the matterSince the days of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, film-makers have adopted naive or comedic perspectives to pierce and deflate the hideous bubble of Nazi ideology – a risky strategy that can reap rich rewards.
In the 1967 classic The Producers, Mel Brooks made comedy gold from the spectre of a terrible play celebrating Hitler’s little-known dance skills.
The film won a best screenplay Oscar and spawned a hit stage musical that in turn produced another star-studded screen adaptation.
In 1999, Roberto Benigni’s “comedy drama” Life Is Beautiful won three Oscars with its depiction of a man whose comic clowning keeps the horrors of a concentration camp from his son – a premise weirdly reminiscent of Jerry Lewis’s ill-judged The Day the Clown Cried,
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