The Return of Jane Fonda’s long-M.I.A. “F.T.A.”

The controversial 1972 doc about Fonda's anti-U.S.O. tour finally comes to DVD.

Nettlesome in its own way, Wolfgang Staudte’s “The Kaiser’s Lackey” (1951) emerges from the cloud of German-culture guilt after WWII to make scalding mockery of Prussian pride, albeit of the Old World, Wilhelmine variety. Based on Heinrich Mann’s novel, the film applies a rather impish, absurdist tone (that’s been compared to Michael Powell in his “Blimp” phase) to the life of a solid German citizen (Werner Peters) who begins as a conscientious coward and evolves slowly into a proto-Fascist imperialist wannabe, fulfilling every anti-Semitic, totalitarian, nationalist and jingoist impulse in the German character along the way. (Mann’s title, “Der Untertan,” has no English translation, but expresses the very Germanic idea of someone being an underling and a tinpot bully both.) Depicting, after the war, the archetypal German as a weak-willed follower smacks of self-recusation, but then he and the film evolves to encompass everything we, and certainly the filmmakers, recognize as the maniacal and destructive aspects of the German character, which are represented by a zoological array of ludicrous 19th-century Teutonic mustaches.

Fortunately, the prevailing mood is high satire, particularly once our hero falls in with a beer-quaffing fraternity of Prussian would-be aristocrats, whose faces are all crisscrossed from scars they incur from inciting idiotic fencing duels. (There’s also a pitch-perfect supporting performance from a Great Dane.) The tone of Staudte’s film seems less in any German tradition than in, say, the Czech, but given the postwar atmosphere, that could only be a good thing; even the climactic courtroom trial boils down to a drunken argument between two differing styles of anti-Semitic viciousness, and concerns a Kaiser-defaming slur that was not in fact uttered.

“F.T.A.” (Docurama) and “The Kaiser’s Lackey” (First Run Features) are now available on DVD.

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