A historical horror story from the 1930s, John Rabe could have been made in that decade. The movie, named for a German industrialist who helped save perhaps 250,000 Chinese civilians from rampaging Japanese troops, melds stark reality and sentimental fiction in a style that lost its edge decades ago.
Florian Gallenberger’s movie is instructive nonetheless, with sequences that effectively convey the savagery of an assault that took an estimated 300,000 lives. But it would be stronger without its invented moments and old-movie set pieces.
Blending black-and-white newsreel footage with reconstructions, the film depicts the conquerors’ infamies: random attacks on civilians, widespread rapes, the systematic slaughter of POWs, beheadings as a form of sport and the use of Chinese corpses to fill large potholes. But the worst atrocities happen off-camera — and never to characters we’ve come to know well.
Rabe died in 1950, barely a decade after leaving a devastated Nanking (now usually transliterated “Nanjing”). His role in creating the city’s “safety zone” for civilians didn’t become widely known until the 1990s, with the disclosure of his long-secret diaries and the publication of Iris Chang’s best-selling The Rape of Nanking.
A longtime Siemens employee and a loyal Nazi, Rabe (Ulrich Tukur) is the ideal witness to what happened in Nanking in 1937. He has no motivation to exaggerate the crimes of Japan, Germany’s ally at the time. For purposes of the Teutonic film market, he’s also a “good German” from a period that doesn’t provide much material for uplifting biopics.
