ocufans.com for more great docudramas and documentaries There's very little shading here. By and large, this Adolf Hitler is a wicked, vengeful, paranoid, anti-Semitic lunatic pretty much from the get-go; indeed, the opening credits aren't even over before he is revealed as an angry boy who was beaten and belittled by his father and smothered by his mother, an aspiring artist embittered by repeated rejections of his work, and an impressionable young man who was convinced that Jews were the root of all that's wrong with the world. And that's all before the role is assumed by Robert Carlyle, who dominates the proceedings thereafter with a commanding, convincing performance. Hitler: The Rise of Evil chronicles the major events leading up to his assumption of power in the mid-1930s, including his time in the trenches in World War I and fury at Germany's signing of the Treaty of Versailles; his gradual emergence as a charismatic and powerful orator and eventual dominance of the National Socialist party; his first attempted takeover of the government, which resulted in failure (and a brief stay in prison, where he wrote Mein Kampf); and his eventual emergence as the all-powerful Fuhrer who devised the Final Solution and led his country into a disastrous war (the film ends in '34, several years before World War II began).
