POLIWOOD: There's No Business Like Shoah Business!

It’s bad old joke (“There’s no business like Shoah business!”) but that’s what Lionel Chetwynd and I discuss on this week’s Poliwood. We focus on The Reader, one of the films nominated for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, but also make a tour d’horizon of Holocaust films of the past from The Sorrow and the Pity to Schindler’s List to Enemies, A Love Story, in which I had a hand. Ironically, discussions of “Shoah business” these days are gloomily au courant, what with the spurious comparisons made, in the wake of Gaza, by the BBC and others to the behavior of the Israelis and the Nazis. Perhaps that’s why, dark as the films may be, Holocaust movies are just as necessary as they ever were. And some of them make brilliant cinema. I rather like what Lionel and I did with this. Have a look – or have at me.