The Eichmann Show

1961, Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann is to be tried and the trial will be broadcast on television. The producer Milton Fruchtman takes it on and chooses Leo Hurwitz to direct. Hurwitz has been blacklisted in America and has not worked for years. Concealed cameras are installed in the courtroom. Hurwitz wants one thing: to see a reaction on Eichmann's face. Paul Andrew Williams directs. Martin Freeman plays Fruchtman and Anthony LaPaglia plays Hurwitz. The event is real. The Eichmann trial was the first major war crimes trial broadcast on television and was shown in more than thirty countries; the recordings count as a turning point in bringing testimony about the Holocaust to the public. Real archive footage is used. The witnesses' testimony is not dramatised; the original recordings are shown as they are and the fiction is built around them. The question at the centre is Hurwitz's obsession. He believes Eichmann will react like a human being and keeps the camera on his face for it; he does not find what he is looking for. It was made for the BBC at television scale, with a small budget and few locations. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of the Holocaust and of television broadcasting. Who it is not for: the archive footage is very heavy, the fictional passages are weak beside it, and the structure is conventional.