With your forbearance, one more take on Schindler's list:
 
     My first misgivings arose, before the film started, when I
noticed the large number of people with popcorn boxes.  Everyone
knows what this film is about.  A Hollywood director speaking
about the unspeakable, making us think about the unthinkable,
showing us what we really don't want to see -- was this going to
be business as usual?
 
     No more than thirty minutes into the film I was thinking
about two things.  I remembered seeing Gentlemen's Agreement, the
first major studio film to deal with anti-semitism, and my
reaction to it.  I was used to seeing films about prejudice
against blacks and feeling empathy.  How different it was, as a
Jew, to feel identity with the victim.  Well, not quite.  That
film was, after all, about a righteous Christian journalist,
appalled by anti-semitism, who passes himself off as a Jew to
write a story about bigotry.  The movie really wasn't about me,
it was about them.  Still, it was a kind of a breakthrough.
 
     As I watched Schindler's List, something dawned on me.  In
so many films about the oppression of blacks, even recent ones,
either a subtext or the main thread of the story is about how
this oppression transforms a white person, who is then motivated
to do good.  The white person is then thanked, maybe honored by
the blacks.  And that's what these films are actually about,
which the audience usually "gets."  I knew this intellectually,
but I never felt it so viscerally as when I was seeing
Schindler's List.
 
     For here was Hollywood finally confronting the Holocaust,
head-on, and what was the film _really_ about?  It's the story of
how a gentile redeems himself, comes to see the error of his
ways, and does good, for which he finally gets the "gratitude"
that Ben Kingsley has so masterfully withheld throughout the
picture.  Goddam it if it wasn't the ennobled white man being
thanked by the blacks again.
 
     Did Spielberg make a conscious decision that this was the
only way the general public could take in or accept a Holocaust
film?  Or was he simply caught up by the power of the story and
decided that he wanted to film this book?
 
     Which is not to say that Oscar Schindler's salvation isn't a
beautiful story.  For that matter, I usually cry at the end of
Dickens' Christmas Carol.  I love it when Scrooge is transformed.
In a tough world, we need to hang on to the possibility of
redemption and salvation.  I cried a little at the end of
Schindler's List.  That last scene in which the real "Schindler's
Jews" visit his grave, accompanied by actors from the film, was
genuinely touching.  But, strange to me, at least, it was the
only time I was moved to tears.
 
     And what of Spielberg's Holocaust?  The photography is
vivid, he clearly went to great pains to make it historically
accurate and did not flinch from portraying terrible things, and
the sound deserves an Academy Award.  But I was so aware of the
technology employed that even with the great acting -- and I
credit Spielberg with eliciting it -- it did not shake me.  For
example, I can never recall seeing a scene in which a person is
shot that seemed so "real."  But that was what dominated my
senses: how Spielberg achieved the effect.
 
     Nor does he refrain from slickness, at least early on,
where there is dialogue that is as snappy as any in a Howard
Hawks film.  The scene in Auschwitz where the women are herded
into what we expect to be a gas chamber was pure manipulation, a
la Hitchcock.  Yes, I clenched the armrests on my seat as they
hoped for water but expected gas -- something like I did when
Janet Leigh made the mistake of taking a shower at the Bates
Motel in Psycho.  But surely Spielberg did not think that he was
showing us what it _really_ felt like to be the women as they
awaited their fate.  Or did he?
 
     By the movie's end I realized that all those people munching
popcorn as they were supposedly about to gaze into the abyss
unconsciously knew something that I didn't.  And, having skipped
lunch, I went out and had a good dinner.
 
     I hope the picture will make many people more aware of the
Holocaust and fight the forces of malevolence and bigotry that
would deny its truth and horror.  I think it might, just as
Gentlemen's Agreement probably helped, to some extent, to fight
anti-semitism.  But it is hardly the bold and unflinching look at
this terrible time that many have made it out to be.
 
     I guess Spielberg will finally get his Academy Award.  But,
given what is in the foreground of his film, there is more than a
little irony that the prize he covets should be called "Oscar."