Posted on 07/23/2007 5:01:51 PM PDT by blam
Tom Cruise is compared to Nazi propagandist
By Paul Willis
Last Updated: 12:44pm BST 23/07/2007
Tom Cruise has found himself being compared to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in an outspoken attack from Germany’s Protestant Church.
Cruise on the set of Valkyrie
The Hollywood star was accused of producing “propaganda for Scientology” as he began work on a film about an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Cruise has already been barred from filming at military sites for the movie because of his membership of the Scientologists, who are regarded as a cult by the German authorities.
Thomas Gandow, 60, a spokesman on religious cults for the German Protestant Church, said Mr Cruise’s support for the organisation had made him the “Goebbels of Scientology", describing the Scientologists as a “totalitarian organisation”.
Mr Cruise is in Germany making a film about Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Nazi dictator in July 1944 with a bomb hidden in a briefcase.
The film, planned for a 2008 release and to be directed by Bryan Singer and co-starring Kenneth Branagh, is called Valkyrie after Operation Valkyrie, the plot's codename.
However, in spite of the bitter campaign against Cruise, which has been criticised by German film-makers as damaging to the German film industry, Valkyrie has been quietly awarded sponsorship from the country’s film board.
In a separate twist, the project has also helped revive the fortunes of a film stage used by Goebbels to make Nazi propaganda films. Founded in 1911, Babelsberg film stages, near Berlin, gained early celebrity with the filming of Fritz Lang's Metropolis in 1927. However, when the Nazi’s came to power the stages were used for some of their most notorious propaganda films, including the anti-Semitic Jud Suss (1940), aimed at whipping up anti-Jewish sentiment.
Too hot dam funny!
I simply see no resemblance.
- Katie
Xenu bad. Thetan good.
They are regarded as a cult by just about everyone, except the Scientologists. But, here in the USA, we do treat religions we do not care for a little differently then Germany does.
He is too damn scatterbrained to even make a good nazi.
It is such an insult to the memory of Claus von Stauffenberg that Cruise would play him.
LOL!
[i]Thomas Gandow, 60, a spokesman on religious cults for the German Protestant Church, said Mr Cruise’s support for the organisation had made him the “Goebbels of Scientology”, describing the Scientologists as a “totalitarian organisation”. [/i]
Well, if anybody would know...
It appears to me the Germans can't discern either.
That picture is hard to make-believe.
Cruise has no credibility portraying historical figures.
Actors do as actors do, as it were.
Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins beg to differ.
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