Jacob the Liar (Jakob der Lügner) is a 1975 film from East Germany directed by Frank Beyer, based on the 1969 novel by Jurek Becker.
Jakob Heym is a Jew, confined to a ghetto somewhere in Poland (the source novel specified Łódź) during the Nazi occupation. The Holocaust is underway, with the Jews in the ghetto completely cut off from the outside world, starving, working as slave labor for the Nazis, while groups of them are occasionally carted off in trains to parts unknown. Jakob, who owned a cafe in better times, now works at the railway station loading manufactured goods onto trains. He looks after a little orphan girl, Lina, whose parents have disappeared, almost certainly killed by the Nazis.
One night Jakob is walking through the streets of the ghetto when he is caught by a sentry and sent to the police station for being outside after the 8 pm curfew. However the duty officer is drunk, and eventually Jacob is able to sneak out and go home—but not before he hears a news report on a radio indicating that the Russians are advancing are only 20 km from the (fictional) town of Bezekina.
The next day Jakob excitedly shares this information while working at the rail yard. His coworker Mischa refuses to believe his story, with its unlikely details about Jakob somehow escaping from the clutches of the SS. So Jakob instead tells Mischa that he has a radio (strictly forbidden for the Jews of the ghetto) on which he heard the news report.
This backfires. Mischa excitedly shares this story with other Jews of the ghetto. Soon everyone is pestering Jakob to tell them news of the outside world, and particularly news of the Russian advance. Jakob, unwilling to admit he lied and to disappoint everyone, continues to pretend that he has a radio, and starts regaling his friends and acquaintances with entirely fictional accounts of the Russian advance.
One of only a few films made during the 40-year existence of East Germany that received widespread distribution in the capitalist west. A Foreign Remake (or rather a second adaptation of the novel) in English, Jakob the Liar starring Robin Williams, was released in 1999.
Tropes:
- Call-Back: For Lina, Jakob fakes a fairy tale over the radio, in which a princess thinks clouds are made of cotton balls. As the whole community is being carted off to death in a concentration camp at the end, Lina gazes at the clouds in the sky and asks if they're really made out of cotton balls.
- Downer Ending: The whole community is gathered up in cattle cars and sent off to death, probably in Chelmno, possibly in Auschwitz. The film ends with all the surviving characters riding in a cattle car.
- Driven to Suicide: Jakob's best friend Kowalski kills himself after Jakob admits that he has no radio and knows nothing of Russian advances.
- "Fawlty Towers" Plot: A dark example, as Jakob engages in increasingly desperate measures in order to conceal the truth. When Lina asks to listen to the radio, Jakob hides behind a wall and fakes a radio broadcast, including a Winston Churchill impersonation. He sneaks into a German outhouse in order to steal their newspaper for news, only to find that the sections of paper were useless sports info. He claims that he can't use the radio because he no longer has electricity, only for his friends to show him an unoccupied apartment that still has power. He claims that the radio is broken, only for Kowalski to introduce him to a radio technician, forcing Jakob to lie that he fixed the radio himself.
- Final Solution: The extermination of Polish Jewry by slave labor, starvation, and finally deportation to death camps.
- Flashback: Jakob has a series of flashbacks of happier times before the war. Most of them are of his wife, but towards the end there are flashbacks of his friendship with Kowalski.
- Glasses Pull: Kowalski sees that Jakob is about to be caught in a German toilet, so he knocks over a stack of crates in order to distract the guard. He then pulls off his glasses as the German stomps over, and he realizes what is about to happen to him.
- Gossip Evolution: Discussed Trope. A customer at Kowalski's barber shop argues with him over news of the Russian advance, only for Kowalski to argue that Jakob is their sole source of news and that reports get exaggerated as they're passed on from him.
- Heartwarming Orphan: Lina, a small child who takes refuge with Jakob after her parents disappeared.
- Hope Bringer: Jakob winds up becoming this, making up stories of the Red Army's advance to Jews who dream of deliberation.
- Imagine Spot: As Jakob tells the story of the princess, there's an elaborate Imagine Spot from Lina's perspective in which she imagines herself as the princess in the castle—but still wearing her Jewish star. She also briefly imagines working in Jakob's cafe.
- P.O.V. Cam: A Jitter Cam POV from Mischa's point of view as he races through the ghetto to save Rosa, as the Nazis are combing through her neighborhood and deporting Jews.
- This Is a Work of Fiction: The film opens with three title cards. The first says "The tale of Jacob the liar is not true." The second says "Honest." Then the third says "But maybe it is true after all."
- Translation Convention: Polish Jews, and everyone's speaking German, not Polish or Yiddish.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Mr. Frankfurter is acutely aware that the Jews of the ghetto are doomed, which is why he's not very happy to hear Mischa and Rosa talk about wedding plans.
