Playing for Time

 SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

I’m analyzing a television movie for a change. Playing for Time (1980) is a horrifying, yet inspiring award-winning telecast based on a true story set in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. The production won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama (Special) and Best Teleplay by the great Arthur Miller. It also received the prestigious Peabody Award.

The opening credits are shown against a sketch of a swastika overlaid with the abbreviated outline of a woman. We also hear a woman singing. The outline then is superimposed onto the singer played by Vanessa Redgrave (she received the Best Actress Emmy for this role). She portrays Fania Fenelon, a Jewish cabaret performer in Paris. The image suggests the main character of the story is trying to eclipse the despicable nature of the Nazis.

While she sings the film depicts German soldiers and a swastika decorated train invading Paris, disrupting the soothing calm of Fania’s singing. She is then in one of the suffocating cattle cars with so many others, including children, headed for the concentration camp. The editing shows how quickly evil can destroy a free society.

The film intersperses actual footage throughout to stress the reality of the tale. The car has only a bucket for the passengers to relieve themselves. A man dies in the car due to the horrid conditions. When they arrive at the camps the dehumanization shifts into full force. They must strip. The Germans cut off their hair, and they are reduced to being identified by tattooed numbers, like cattle.

The German soldiers crowd the prisoners into cramped barracks and show them smoke from the ovens where the bodies of dead fellow travelers were burned. The prisoners must perform hard labor and endure physical abuse. Fania tells a story to her young friend, Marianne (Melanie Mayron), about a princess to distract her from the presence of the dead woman next to them. The film here introduces the theme of how art can help one face the horrible acts of reality.

That drama enhances that theme when the inmates are asked if anyone can sing Madame Butterfly. Fania now finds a way to make a pact with the devil to survive. The guards bring her to the camp’s orchestra which is comprised of women. Amid this place of horror there is a seed of civilized culture because the Nazi monsters like to think their heinous acts do not infringe on their right to appreciate the arts.

The conductor is the stern Alma Rose (Jane Alexander, winner of a Best Supporting Actress Emmy for her portrayal). Fania must audition for Alma, which is difficult given the physical deprivation she has endured. But her enthusiasm for one of the opera’s beautiful arias overcomes her torment. Lagerfuhrein Maria Mandel (Shirley Knight), who oversees the women at the camp, interrupts her moving rendition showing how the Germans have control over the beauty of the music here. Fania uses her leverage with Mandel to get Marianne to sing with the orchestra, which shows how art can sometimes save those who seem lost. (Marianne acts like a child often, wanting or taking things to satisfy her own needs. She wants to place Fania in the role of a mother who tends to all her wants, which Fania tries to resist).

Mandel wants the orchestra members to look the part, so she gets them clothing that has been confiscated. To the Nazis, the musicians are like puppets that are to perform for the captors’ pleasure. The orchestra’s poor rehearsing is due to it originally being a marching band, Alma yells at the performers, telling them that “music is the holiest activity of mankind.” That description is to stress that there can be heavenly hopes in such a hellish place. The members discover that Fania can orchestrate the music to ensure that all play their parts to create a successful rendition. Alma is happy to learn this fact, but warns Fania that she can’t just have the goal of creating good music. She says they must please the Nazis, and that their jailers’ whims can change rapidly. So, artistry must allow for pragmatism for Alma. Fania has a difficult time realizing how much the Nazis hate her for being a Jew. Alma tells her there is only room for life and death in the camp, and other feelings must be put aside.

The incarcerated orchestra improves greatly and has a concert before Nazi soldiers, who may admire the music but will not condescend to give applause. They simply walk out when the show is done. It is not to be praised but to avoid disapproval, and its consequences, that is the goal.

Fania is willing to share her possessions, but the other inmates can’t seem to get rid of their prejudices despite being objects of discrimination. One, a Catholic, is anti-Semitic and the Polish women are segregated from the rest. What brings them together is music (art is again the savior) as Fania and Marianne sing “Stormy Weather” which conjures up shared feelings about lost romantic loves. However, music can be perverted to accompany vicious behavior as the band is used to produce marching music to exhort the women to do exhausting and degrading labor. At night Fania hears the screams of those either tortured or sent to the gas chambers.

Fania declares she will not descend into becoming an animal. Marianne becomes cynical quickly and prostitutes herself for some food. Fania catches her and tells her she shouldn’t degrade herself. But after the girl leaves food on her desk, Fania’s basic needs win out over her morality, and she eats the food. Fania starts out as controlled and calm. As time goes on, it becomes very difficult for her to witness the atrocities. It starts to make her numb in contrast to the feelings of one of the girls who loves another there. Fania says it is a blessing to have any emotion in such a place.

When Fania gets to sing the Madame Butterfly aria she is very impressive. One of her admirers is, of all people, Dr. Joseph Mengele (Max Wright), who performed grotesque experiments on inmates. In one scene we have such beauty and such horror. Fania makes sure they understand that someone who is Jewish can sing so well when she says her father’s name was Goldstein and that she should be called Fania Goldstein.

For her performance, Fania receives supplies. As the women rummage through the new possessions, one of the musicians says that she must live so she can go to Israel and produce Jewish children to fight for Jewish empowerment. Another wants communism to rise out of the ashes of Germany. While the others see only that the problem is the Nazis, Fania says that the real problem to solve is what would make people who would otherwise be admired become sadistic creatures. Her question is pertinent to the scene where Alma screams at one of the musicians and hits her when she can’t produce the right result. Can circumstances turn anyone into someone brutal? After the incident, Alma tells Fania she was in love with a man in Vienna, but he became a Nazi soldier, and she was arrested for being Jewish. She cries at the heartbreak she endured. Fania admits that Alma’s strength has saved them, but she can’t accept the harshness from her. Alma urges Fania to back her up so they can all survive. She says that Fania must shut out what is going on outside and concentrate on perfecting the music. Alma says it is not that she can’t see what’s going on in the camp, it’s that she refuses to. She is saying that the music and the artistry to make it come alive must be their escape, mentally and hopefully, physically.

Fania and Marianne are half-Jewish which means they should not be gassed. They are told to remove half of the Jewish Star of David sewn on their clothing. Marianne gladly does it, but others in the orchestra ridicule Fania and Marianne for what they see as a capitulation to antisemitism. Fania yells that she doesn’t care about cultures and backgrounds, only that the Nazis have reviled her as an individual. She wavers between feelings about group persecution and the desecration of the individual. She sews the part of the star back on showing how she does not want to turn her back on what makes her who she is. She keeps trying to hold onto her humanity and clashes with Alma when the conductor holds back rewards of food as an incentive to perform well. But Fania also voices the fear that it may be “too late for the whole human race.”

A handyman, Schmuel (Will Lee), tells Fania how they are gassing 12,000 prisoners a day. But, he does not become distressed. He rationalizes the holocaust by saying the victims are all angels who will report to God. The movie suggests that each person either despairs or finds a way to survive the hell he or she is in. That same man gives a message to Fania that the Allies have landed, which means the start of D-Day. The women also learn that the translator who was so useful to the Nazis and would not be intimidated, had escaped with a man. They play the Wedding March showing the joy that music holds. There is some hopeful news arriving amid the bleakness. But that joy is short-lived because the soldiers catch the translator and her male friend and bring them back to the camp to be hanged.

An example of the complexity of the human spirit appears in the scene where the Lagerfuhrein delights in a small blond child, doting on him and letting him play in the orchestra room. Some of the musicians see a human side to her, but another points out how she took the child from the mother, and that wrongful act should not be wiped away. The stark contrast in human behavior is emphasized outside as the Lagerfuhrein plays ball with the child amid corpses on the ground.

Commandant Kramer (Clarence Felder) demonstrates the complete control he has over the women. He takes one girl away to watch his children, removes the piano for the officers, yet still expects the orchestra to meet his expectations. A male Jew is to show one of the female musicians how to play a piece on the cello. As he touches her in silence, placing his hands on hers, there is a poignant moment how much physical affection no longer exists for these captives. The diabolical Mengele intertwines his music appreciation with deviant scientific whims as he wants the orchestra to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the mentally ill so he can observe the effects on the patients. He will then have the patients gassed. The story continues the contrast between what is creative and what is destructive as real footage of the Nazi forces continuing their concentration camp activities offsets the classical music, and the jarring sounds of screams and gunshots in the background punctuate the elevated music of the great composers.

One of the Polish musicians tells Fania people like to talk to her because she has no causes and only acts like an individual human being with strong feelings. Fania, however, says she can’t help others because she is “dying by inches,” and is starting to develop a failure to thrive, not being interested in eating. She tells the Polish woman that they are not more valuable to save than others. Fania sees the world as beyond salvation now since its sins have been so nullifying.

Alma is overjoyed that she is getting out of the camp to play for the fighting soldiers. She rationalizes that she will not be playing for the murderers who run the camp but for “honorable” men. Fania is angry because Alma doesn’t seem to realize that she will be entertaining those who are fighting for the Nazi way of life. Frau Schmidt (Viveca Lindfors), one of the camp officers, congratulates Alma, and invites her to dinner. Alma wants to believe that Schmidt, who she says has wanted off the camp, has the decency to have kind words for her. It’s as if Fania is now the one who is the more cynical of the two. Fania is right. Schmidt wouldn’t let a Jew get out before her. Mengele (an admirer of Alma’s musical abilities) and other officers gather the orchestra members together and the women find Alma in a coffin. The rumor is that Schmidt poisoned her.

The orchestra descends into anarchy without the strength of Alma, who said she wanted Fania to be the new conductor. However, a frantic and irrational Olga (Christine Baranski) wants to be the leader, and the discordant sounds that the musicians produce under her conducting mirrors the lack of harmony among the women. Marianne has prostituted herself with the camp executioner and the other women scorn her. However, Fania says they have all changed and should not be judgmental because they have learned that each person has the potential to act immorally. Fania takes on the survivalist role of Alma and promises Mengele that the orchestra will strive to perform to Alma’s expectations.

However, there is also a bit of humanity even within the hearts of some of the villains. The Lagerfuhrein has lost the child she took from her mother and now cries as she asks for another rendition of the Madame Butterfly aria to soothe her distress. As has happened often, the sounds of war interrupt the beauty of the music, and the officer reverts to savagery as she shoots a disruptive inmate.

As the Allies attack, the soldiers evacuate the camp in a vain attempt to maintain their lost dominance. The Allied soldiers liberate them from a crowded barn. But, Marianne has lost her soul and injures Fania as she joins her captors with whom she had previously joined sexually. She now can’t remain with the other Jews since she has so compromised herself.

A journalist asks the shaking Fania to say something. Appropriately the story ends with her singing, music being the only way she can exist in a world of horror.