THE COUNTERFEITERS (DIE FALSCHER) World Cinema

Austrian writer/director Stefan Ruzowitsky tells a little-known, true-life story of World War II. Solomon Sorowitsch, (Karl Markovics) a gifted artist, black-market forger and Russian Jew, is plucked from almost certain death in a Nazi concentration camp and put in charge of a massive Nazi effort to flood England and America with counterfeit currency. Sorowitsch plays a tense cat-and-mouse game with the clever and amoral 55 officer Herzog (David Striesow), who arrests him and then exploits his talents, while struggling to keep himself and his disparate crew alive in a world of terrifyingly arbitrary violence and death.

Like Jean-Pierre Melville’s recently restored classic ARMY OF SHADOWS, THE COUNTERFEITERS employs the suspenseful rhythms of gangster films in revisiting a tale of Nazi-era crimes feral intensity of Markovics in the leading role summons up memories of Bogart and Garfield, who, both in their crime films and anti-fascist classics of the ’40s, helped define male resource fulness and resilience under the most extreme pressures.