A Bit of Film and War: "Condor's Nest"
My column series returns covering an obscure WWII movie so cheaply made, I couldn't help but admire it.
A Bit of Film and War is a monthly column series covering war movies. I break down films from the classics to the obscure, detailing what wars they cover and if they’re worth checking out. It’s free for all subscribers to this Substack, but if you enjoy my writing, consider opting for a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to exclusive in-depth pieces and my entire backlog of work. Your support is greatly appreciated!
My weekly column series Bonus Perspectives is off this week and in its place I’m bringing back a long overdue entry of A Bit of Film and War. In case you weren’t subscribed that far back, in April I started a new column series dedicated to covering my favorite genre of cinema, the war film. I wrote about The Guns of Navarone and was pleased with how it turned out, but was never able to find the time to write further articles in the series.
Well, that time is now. As I elaborated in a previous edition of Bonus Perspectives, the last week of every month will feature a new entry in A Bit of Film and War in its place. Like Bonus Perspectives, this too is a free column for all subscribers of the Foreign Perspectives Substack, so no further action is required to get access to it. Still, I would very much appreciate it if you would consider a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to my entire archive of work and upcoming pieces that will be exclusively for paid subscribers. Foreign Perspectives recently surpassed 800 subscribers and I’m trying to hit 1,000 by the end of the year.
Without further delay though, let’s move on to this month’s edition of A Bit of Film and War with Condor’s Nest, a very low budget independent WWII movie that I guarantee you’ve probably never heard of. Why am I devoting an entire article to it? Because while it’s far away from anything particularly good, I’m amazed that such a film like this exists at all in the year of our Lord 2024. It’s like a cross between a run-of-the-mill 1980s war movie that was forgotten after its initial theatrical run and one of those early 2000s direct-to-DVD flicks you see in Walmart bargain bins for $5. Here at A Bit of Film and War we don’t just cover the classics, we cover the obscure too.
What’s the film?
Condor’s Nest premiered on Jan. 27, 2023 via limited theatrical releases across major U.S. cities before quickly moving to digital, streaming, and home video. Despite clearly being made on a shoestring budget, Paramount Pictures is the distributor and seemed to have enough faith in the project to pick it up. I normally include the Japanese title given where I live, but this film seems to have never gotten a release here. The title probably takes inspiration from other WWII movies like Where Eagles Dare and The Eagle Has Landed.
I saw Condor’s Nest earlier this year when I traveled via Delta Airlines back to Japan, it being part of the free in-flight movie package. Being thousands of miles above the ground with no internet, there was no way to check its reception, so I went into it blind. Despite being released in 2023, there’s actually very little information about the film available online. You know that you’re in for a treat when there’s not even a Wikipedia article.
What’s the war?
The Second World War obviously, but more specifically the years after it. While the Third Reich was defeated and its leadership executed after WWII with the Nuremberg trials, thousands of Nazis escaped to South America via “ratlines” and lived in their new adopted countries under assumed names. Many escaped justice for decades thanks to sympathetic governments and supporters. It should come as no surprise that such an intriguing subject lends well to movies and documentaries like Condor’s Nest, though if you want something a bit less schlocky I’d probably recommend Operation Finale starring Oscar Isaac or the Netflix true crime series The Devil Next Door.
What’s it about?
The story blends real stories of Nazis fleeing to South America and the bizarre conspiracy theory that Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man Heinrich Himmler actually survived the war to lead the Fourth Reich. If that sounds like an utterly insane plot, that’s because it is. Condor’s Nest deciding to take such a wacky alternative history narrative and playing it all completely straight like an espionage thriller is what compelled me to keep watching to the very end even though the overall believability was quite thin.
Toward the end of WWII, U.S. Army sniper Will Spalding and his B17 crewmates are shot down over France. Nazi soldiers lead by SS Colonel Martin Bach quickly surround the men except for Spalding who was previously ordered to scout the area from a distance. He witnesses Bach kill all the men in cold blood, making him the only one in the group who survives the war. Years later, he travels to Argentina on a quest for revenge, only to realize that a greater plot is at hand to revive the Nazis under Heinrich Himmler and threaten the world with nuclear weapons.
Provided that you can suspend your disbelief and are prepared for something closer to Quentin Tarantino’s highly fictionalized Inglourious Basterds over Bryan Singer’s stick-to-the-facts Valkyrie, Condor’s Nest will likely hold your interest. It covers an aspect of WWII most tend to forget about and will probably get you to at least check Wikipedia for more information, which is something any decently compelling war movie should do.
Who’s the director?
Someone new to the scene named Phil Blattenberger. His only other film before Condor’s Nest was a Vietnam War drama called Point Man, according to IMDB. I haven’t seen that one, but the description suggests that it’s a similarly low budget war movie and both works share a couple of cast members. I wonder if this is what will become his signature genre, but either way it’s pretty admirable that he was able to get two ambitious period pieces made despite having few industry connections.
According to a comment the director himself posted on Reddit, Condor’s Nest happened because he built a full-scale B17 bomber in a North Carolinian field to attract investors. Somehow this impressed them enough to back the film and a few reasonably big name actors ended up getting attached to the project. Again, you can’t help but admire the tenacity in this day and age. It isn’t clear how successful the film was, but I would certainly be interested in seeing what Blattenberger makes in the future.
Who’s in it?
Most of the marketing around Condor’s Nest focused heavily on the participation of Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy) and Michael Ironside (Top Gun, Splinter Cell). Ironside’s role, however, amounts to little more than a glorified cameo and I was disappointed to see that he didn’t play a more prominent character. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Vosloo turned in a committed performance as the main villain Colonel Martin Bach. It’s in line with previous villains he’s done and you buy the idea that he’s a ruthless Nazi commander.
A few other familiar faces like Jackson Rathbone (Twilight) and Jorge Garcia (LOST) are also part of the cast. These aren’t necessarily the biggest name actors, but Condor’s Nest being able to attract any talent apart from complete unknowns suggests that enough people had faith in the project’s concept. Even the unknown actors aren’t bad. Jacob Keohane as the protagonist Will Spalding totally sells the role of a traumatized soldier consumed by revenge. He conveys a lot through just his eyes and I hope he’s able to get bigger roles. Condor’s Nest features a surprisingly large cast and for a film of this caliber, it’s nice to see that most involved seemed to view it as more than just an easy paycheck.
The Foreign Perspectives review
In life there are some films that you would never watch under normal circumstances unless they were put in front of you by pure chance. I’m talking about the movies that you don’t seek out; they find you. Such an occasion fell into my lap during my trip back from the United States in February, which I wrote about earlier this year.
On the Delta flight returning to Japan, I was faced with a plethora of options to watch with the available movies, but for whatever reason decided to choose Condor’s Nest over what were probably better selections overall. Maybe it’s because the inner war film buff within me will never say no to anything WWII-related even if it’s rubbish or pure schlock. Count me in the category of people who liked Frankenstein’s Army. What can I say, I have a soft spot for the ridiculous.
Granted, Condor’s Nest isn’t anywhere near as weird as that, but I’d still call it one of the strangest war movies I’ve seen in recent memory. While probably not very stellar by any objective standards of modern filmmaking, I couldn’t help but feel inspired to write about it because it’s nothing like anything out now. It feels like a relic of a bygone age when you could go to the cinema almost every month and see a new war film. The plots often melded together and originality was slim, but you still had a good time with your mates because it did exactly what it said on the tin.
One shouldn’t go into Condor’s Nest thinking that they’re getting Dunkirk or 1917. The cinematography is rather pedestrian and the script itself is nothing to write home about, but what made the film enjoyable for me was its earnestness. So much of Hollywood today relies heavily on cynicism or tongue-in-cheek winking at the audience, but there’s none of that here. This is an old fashioned war movie about unfinished business with Nazis who escaped justice. It raises some interesting questions around the nature of revenge and closure, but it doesn’t try to be any deeper than it has to be. While far away from an Academy Award winning story, it knows its limitations and works within them reasonably well.
There are only a handful of action sequences, but the drama around them provides some decent buildup and the film thankfully never overstays its welcome at a lean 100 minutes. While the conspiracy theory stuff around a secret Fourth Reich was entertaining, I found the highlight to be the inner conflict faced by our protagonist Will Spalding. Jacob Keohane convincingly plays him as a man who has already lost everything and has no purpose other than to seek vengeance against the Nazi who executed his fellow soldiers. There were probably countless men like him who never found inner peace after serving in the war and the existence of living Nazis in South America would have only added insult to injury.
We unfortunately live in a time where antisemitism is on the rise and something once obvious like the Nazis being among the worst regimes of the 20th century is being forgotten. That fact may have become trite at one point due to the sheer amount of WWII movies that were being released in cinemas and video rental stores, but I think we need that reminder again. Something like Condor’s Nest calls back to an age when WWII was closer to living memory, which is why I found myself enjoying it far more than I thought I would.
Interesting facts
It’s estimated that as many as 9,000 Nazi officers and sympathetic collaborators made it to South America in the years after WWII. Brazil, Chile, and especially Argentina became the new homes of these Third Reich escapees. Over three million people in Argentina are of German descent, most of which can be traced to the waves of post-WWII immigration. Imagine the awkward family gatherings.
With a controversial legacy to put it lightly, Argentinian President Juan Perón was known to be a sympathizer of fascists and Nazis. His willingness to provide a safe haven for ex-members of Hitler’s regime allowed notorious SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele and Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann to escape justice for decades. Perón believed he could use the best minds from the Third Reich to benefit his own developing country, which is why he helped Nazis get to his country through secret networks facilitated by diplomats and intelligence officers. It’s understandably a very sore subject for Argentinians today, but like the U.S. recruiting Nazis for its space program, Latin American countries also made pragmatic moves within the context of Cold War geopolitics.
With that said, there’s little direct evidence to suggest that Heinrich Himmler was among the thousands of Nazis who fled Europe for South America. In the context of fiction like Condor’s Nest, such a narrative lends well to a compelling story, but real life is nowhere near as glamorous. In his book SS-1: The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler, writer Hugh Thomas lays out the best case for a plausible scenario where the head of the SS in fact did not commit suicide, though Thomas is a surgeon by profession and should not be confused with the late English historian of the same name. Still, there are some compelling little-known details and a full biography of Himmler’s life, so it’s worth a look even if the overall thesis is shaky at best.
Condor’s Nest is follows a long tradition of fictional works entertaining the idea of the Nazis secretly planning to come back. Robert Ludlum, who was the author of the original Jason Bourne novels, explores the idea of a grand Fourth Reich conspiracy in The Holcroft Covenant. Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil follows a similar theme and was even adapted into a film starring Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele, though I haven’t seen it yet myself. Certainly something that may be covered in a future edition of Bonus Perspectives.
Should you see it?
This is a tough one because while I enjoyed my time with Condor’s Nest, both for legitimate reasons and because of some of the cheesiness on display, it’s not necessarily a film I can wholeheartedly recommend like The Guns of Navarone. It’s cheaply made, you can see when the seams start to come apart, and it’s hardly going to win any points for originality. At the same time, I think it’s impressive that such an old-school war film like this exists at all in the modern landscape of Hollywood which long stopped trying to do works like these ages ago.
If you’re a war film enthusiast like me or someone who simply likes to support underdog projects, you’ll definitely get some entertainment out of it. If the low budget vibes are too distracting for you, the aforementioned Operation Finale and The Devil Next Door are probably better options. Still, I’m glad that Phil Blattenberger got his vision off the ground. With more resources at his disposal, I hope this isn’t the last we see of him when it comes to this genre.
Foreign Perspectives is a reader-supported Substack. If you like my work and have come this far as a new reader or free subscriber, consider opting for a paid subscription so I can continue writing in-depth articles such as these on a regular basis. Your support is greatly appreciated!