When a director needs to mention not once but twice in the opening credits that his film is based on a true story, we might be wise to take it as a harbinger of what exaggerations lie ahead. In Walking With The Enemy, a man in Nazi-occupied Hungary actually impersonates a Nazi officer in order to save Jewish lives. In real life, Pinchas Rosenbaum impersonated a Hungarian officer of the fascist Arrow Cross. Director Mark Schmidt’s curious decision to up the ante to make him a full-blown Nazi ensures a bewildered viewer response. When Rosenbaum’s movie version, Elek Cohen (Jonas Armstrong), is hobnobbing with loose-tongued Nazi officers and one asks him the identity of his commanding officer, Cohen simply bolts and the next thing we know he miraculously appears back at his safe house. Cohen’s German must be so good and the real Nazi officers so casual about not demanding paperwork, that he is able to repeatedly save threatened Jews at gunpoint, or from being carted on the trains to a concentration camps. This despite his again running into the same Nazi officer who asked Cohen the unanswerable question.
Had Schmidt left the real story alone, he might not have conjured up memories of Hogan’s Heroes. As it is, Walking With The Enemy is a film that means well, projects much of the excruciating fear the Nazis were able to utterly instill in innocent victims, and yet falls short, veering toward the schematic at far too many turns. Cohen’s moony-eyed girlfriend (Hannah Tointon) doesn’t help things much. Cohen is lucky enough to stop her rape at the hands of two Nazi officers but incurs the wrath of her uncle (who runs the safe house) when he’s forced to bury their bodies in the building’s basement. Thus the origin of that Nazi uniform Cohen will rely on increasingly to try to ward off some of the evil.
Even the presence of Ben Kingsley as the proud and unblinking Hungarian Regent Horthy, is unable to withstand bloated plot contrivances, and dialogue that, were this not the most serious of subjects, could almost be called comical. When watching a film about Nazi horrors it would be more appropriate if uncomfortable feelings were provoked exclusively from the horrors depicted rather than from any eggs laid in their transference to the screen.
2.0 Ben Kingsleys Alert To An Unfortunately Ho-Hum History Lesson (out of 5 stars)