John Rabe

Based on a true story, this is a moving and powerful movie. At times difficult to watch such cruelty, it's uplifting to see the humanity that was exhibited by John Rabe during a horrible war. Perhaps it would take Steven Spielberg to comment on it and compare his heroism to Schindler's for the movie to get more attention and wider distribution.

The **** of Nanking has been visited quite often of late. This movie attempts to focus one John Rabe, a **** businessman in Nanking, but ends up, inevitably in focusing on the small group of westerners who do their heroic best to save as many chinese as possible from the ravenous Japanese army. The atrocities take a back seat to the machinations of the group to be rescuers while surrounded by barbarians. As a **** Rabe manages to use his countries alliance with Japan to keep a safe zone open to 200,000 chinese. An ironic image is of hundreds of them huddled under a vast flag emblazoned with a Swastika, as it signals the Japanese to bomb elsewhere. Inadvertently they are saved by the emblem of a regime that personified the genocide of innocents. For some reason the other hero in the story Minnie Vautrin, an american missionary responsible for saving 20,000 young women from ****, is presented as a French woman, who risks everyones life in the zone by hiding chinese soldiers, expressly against the charter for the zone. In the end the atrocity of Nanking gets short shrift; **** is mentioned but only as a menace, the dead are mostly soldiers, and the postscript tells us Rabe died a pauper in Germany shortly after the war, unsung. That postscript might make a more fascinating story.