Cheap Max and Helen (Video) (Philip Saville) Price

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Customer Reviews of Max and Helen

Made for TV... But worth watching
Although made for cable television, I found this movie well written, superbly acted, and very enticing. A love story that spans several decades, the video does a good job of using flashbacks to tell the story and grab your attention; and then never lets it go. It proves that even under the most horrific of conditions, love can survive! And also reminds you that some times knowing the truth doesn't mean you have to tell the whole world the truth!

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When the truth is better left unsaid...
This is a film about the tragedy of war, and how hope and redemption can be born from the ashes of shattered lives. Simon Wiesenthal has never given up his hunt for the perpetrators of the Holocaust but out of compassion for three victims he allowed one Nazi to escape justice. This is a story about two young lovers who are torn apart by the Second World War. Max is studying to be a Doctor; Helen is the woman he hopes to marry. Both are Jewish and both are about to end up in a brutal Concentration Camp run by the sadistic Werner Schultz who thinks nothing of beating a man to death with his cane. When Max decides to escape, Helen chooses to stay behind for the sake of her sister Miriam. It will be another twenty years before Max sees Helen again. In the years after the war Max ends up in a forced labour camp in Siberia but eventually he is repatriated to his birthplace, Poland. It is only then does he begin the search for Helen and eventually he finds her, living in West Germany under the name of Helen Weiss. But the past has a terrible way of extracting a dreadful price upon the living, and Max is to find this out when he finally meets up with Helen. For Helen was brutally raped by Werner Schultz and her son Marek is also his son. Unable to cope with this revelation, Max leaves Helen but when Wiesenthal comes looking for Max to testify against Schultz, Max refuses, telling the Nazi Hunter why Werner Schultz must be left alone. If he testifies the truth will come out, and Schultz will know that he has a son by the woman he raped all those years ago. As Helen tells Wiesenthal, "What German court will deny Schultz the right to his son?" This is a brilliant film, well acted, well written and hauntingly crafted as it shows the brutality of war and the suffering its many victims have to endure even when the last battle has been won. Treat Williams is excellent as Max, and Alice Krige (remembered for her role as the Borg Queen in "First Contact") is convincing as Helen, Max's lost love. Martin Landau gives a credible performance as Wiesenthal, all in all this is a well made film that should take its place alongside the dramatisation of "The Diary of Anne Frank."