Schindler's List (1993)
Starring
Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson
Director
Steven Spielberg
Awards
Academy Awards
Best Art Direction
Best Cinematography
Best Director - Steven Spielberg
Best Editing
Best Picture
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Original Score - John Williams
Academy Award Nominations
Best Actor - Liam Neeson
Plot Synopsis
Poland, 1939. When the Nazi party confiscates a housewares plant
from Jewish businessmen, debonair hustler Oskar Schindler agrees to take it over. And with
his know-how, Schindler quickly turns it into a successful factory furnishing soldiers on
the German front with pots and pans. Inside the plant, Polish Jews labor without pay while
Schindler grows wealthy. At the same time, the profiteer forges a close friendship with
his Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern. Schindler's whole point of view changes, however,
when he witnesses a raid on the Jewish ghetto. The opportunistic party member turns into
an active resister, and surreptitiously uses his manufacturing plant as a safe haven for
over 1,000 Jews, rescuing them from certain death. But his deft political maneuvers,
clever machinations and attempts at subterfuge can't go on much longer, not in a world
penetrated by hate, brutality and unbridled fascism. So he'll have to think of a more
drastic plan.
Film Notes
"Steven Spielberg had a banner year in 1993. He scored one
of his biggest commercial hits that summer with the mega-hit Jurassic Park,
but it was the artistic and critical triumph of Schindler's List that Spielberg
called "the most satisfying experience of my career." Adapted from the
best-selling book by Thomas Keneally and filmed in Poland with an emphasis on absolute
authenticity, Spielberg's masterpiece ranks among the greatest films ever made about the
Holocaust during World War II. It's a film about heroism with an unlikely hero at its
center, Catholic war profiteer Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who risked his life and went
bankrupt to save more than 1,000 Jews from certain death in concentration camps.
By employing Jews in his crockery factory manufacturing goods for
the German army, Schindler ensures their survival against terrifying odds. At the same
time, he must remain solvent with the help of a Jewish accountant (Ben Kingsley) and
negotiate business with a vicious, obstinate Nazi commandant (Ralph Fiennes) who enjoys
shooting Jews as target practice from the balcony of his villa overlooking a prison camp. Schindler's
List gains much of its power not by trying to explain Schindler's motivations, but by
dramatizing the delicate diplomacy and determination with which he carried out his
generous deeds.
As a drinker and womanizer who thought nothing of associating
with Nazis, Schindler was hardly a model of decency; the film is largely about his
transformation in response to the horror around him. Spielberg doesn't flinch from that
horror, and the result is a film that combines remarkable humanity with abhorrent
inhumanity, a film that functions as a powerful history lesson and a testament to the
resilience of the human spirit in the context of a living nightmare." (Jeff
Shannon, Amazon.com)
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