Mother Night (1996)

Director:

Keith Gordon

Writers (WGA):

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (novel)
Robert B. Weide (screenplay)

Release Date:

1 November 1996 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance | War

Tagline:

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., is the most patriotic American in the Third Reich.

Plot:

An American spy behind the lines during WWII serves as a Nazi propagandist, a role he cannot escape in his future life as he can never reveal his real role in the war.

Plot Keywords:

American | Spy | Germany | Nazi | Memoir

Cast

Nick Nolte	...	Howard Campbell
Sheryl Lee	...	Helga Noth / Resi Noth
Alan Arkin	...	George Kraft
Bernard Behrens	...	Reverend Dr. Lionel Jones
Anna Berger	...	Epstein's Mother
Arye Gross	...	Dr. Abraham Epstein
Norman Rodway	...	Werner Noth
Frankie Faison	...	Robert Sterling Wilson
Gerard Parkes	...	Father Patrick Keeley
Vlasta Vrana	...	August Krapptauer
Zach Grenier	...	Joseph Goebbels
Kirsten Dunst	...	Young Resi Noth
Anthony J. Robinow	...	Prison Warden
Michael McGill	...	Prison Official
Shimon Aviel	...	Guard Bernard Liebman

MPAA:

Rated R for a scene of sexuality.

Runtime:

114 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | German | Yiddish

Colour:

Black and White | Colour

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Iceland:12 | Finland:K-14 | Portugal:M/12 (video premiere) | Spain:18 | UK:15 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Montréal, Québec, Canada

Company:

Fine Line Features

Trivia:

Director Keith Gordon took a small role in I Love Trouble (1994) so he could get this script to Nick Nolte, whose agents thought the project was "too small."

Quotes:

George Kraft: The Brotherhood of the Walking Wounded. It's the largest organization in the world. You don't even know it exists until you're in it. You get your membership card when you lose the one thing that gives your life any meaning, the thing that binds you together. The thing that holds the group in one piece is the fact that the members are absolutely incapable of speaking to one another.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Be Kind Rewind (2008)

Soundtrack:

White Christmas

The Underappreciated Masterpiece

As Alan Rudolph's "Breakfast of Champions" slides into theaters with little fanfare and much derision it makes me think back to 1996 when Keith Gordon's "Mother Night" came out. Now for all the talk of Kurt Vonnegut being "unfilmable" it's surprising that he has gotten two superb cinematic treatments (the other being "Slaughter-house Five"). "Mother Night" is certainly one of the most underappreciated films of the decade and I cannot understand why. It's brilliant! It stays almost entirely faithful to Vonnegut's book (without being stilted or overly literary) and adds to it a poetry that is purely cinematic. How many film adaptations of any author's work can claim that? Vonnegut himself even puts in a cameo appearance towards the end of the film, and can you ask for a better endorsement than that? Not only is it a beautiful film, it is a beautifully acted, written and directed film and it is among my picks for the top five or so American films of the 1990s. It's a mournful, inspired, surreal masterpiece that does not deserve to be neglected. I would sincerely encourage anyone to see "Mother Night" - it doesn't even take a familiarity with Vonnegut's work to fully appreciate it (as "Slaughter-house Five" sometimes does). It is a powerful, affecting piece of cinema.