Movie Commentary: 'Good'

Based on the play by C.P. Taylor, the 2008 film Good looks at the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany from the perspective of a literature professor. Like many of his fellow citizes, Professor John Halder (Viggo Mortenson) is a good man who is uncomfortable with the coarseness and amorality of the National Socialist movement but accepts it as a device for social and professional advancement.

In many ways, the film is unexceptional in that its themes of corruption and the mind-numbing inhumanity of the Nazis are ones that have been explored any number of times in other works (although I don't think it ever hurts to be reminded of these things and for each generation to continue to explore them). It is, however, exceptional in one small way, and that is its depiction of the punch card system developed by computer pioneer IBM to help the Nazis manage the extermination of European Jews.

IBM is not mentioned by name in the film and, like other U.S. companies that supported Nazi policies during the 1930s and '40s, obviously does not talk about this a lot. For anyone who is interested in learning more about this shameful episode, it is the subject of the excellent book IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation and is discussed in author Jim Marrs' The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America.