Werner Herzog digs up another nugget of Odd History: the story of a simple village blacksmith, Polish and Jewish, who sets out for Berlin in 1932 to assume the job of strongman in a theater called the Palace of the Occult, operated by a crank clairvoyant, and closet Jew, with a mind to becoming Minister of the Occult under Hitler: "I want to be to the present what the Oracle of Delphi was to antiquity." It puts Herzog in familiar company — the innocent, the visionary, the eccentric, the excluded, the intrepid, the overreaching, the grandiose — and it hacks out a fresh trail into the realm of the Holocaust, with the strongman setting himself up (heroically, pathetically) as the New Samson. Anyone who knows the ways of Herzog will not be surprised to learn that the strongman is played by a two-time titlest in the "World's Strongest Man" competition, Jouko Ahola, a Finn, just as the theater's pianist will be played by a classically trained concert artist, Anna Gourari, who gets to strut her stuff in Beethoven. If this results in some awkwardness in the acting (no more than in Herzog's dialogue), it's a price the filmmaker is happy to pay. Whatever price he paid for the unctuous "professionalism" of Tim Roth in the part of the charlatan, it was too steep. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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