When Saturday Night at the Movie's secured the rights to Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (2006) we expected audiences would respond as favourably as we did when the film first came to our attention at TIFF 2006.
Looks like we might have been right.
That they also responded very well to director John Frankenheimer's The Train (1964). Here's a comment from Gus Portelance, Montréal "No complaint,,,, just to say how the two war movies on Saturday evening were excellent The Train and the Black Book. Wonderful !"
Of course these emails and blog comments come like gifts from the weekend when we arrive to find them on our computers Monday morning.
So when Irene sent us this comment; "If you can comment more about all the main actors of "Black Book" movie aired Nov5/11. It was an excellent movie..." I feel it deserves not just an answer, it deserves a blog.
The original title for Black Book is Zwartboek.
In my previous blog, Remembering The Resistance Fighters, I briefly drop the name of Carice van Houten who plays the film's lead, Rachel Stein/Ellis de Vries. van Houten became well known in her Netherlands homeland in the television series, Suzy Q (1999) directed by her friend, Martin Koolhoven. She once played a cat in a woman's body in the film, Minoes (2001.
Her entire character was cut in Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (2008), but she did appear as Tom Cruise's wife in Valkyrie (2008) and as Carol, in Repo Men (2010) starring Jude Law. But despite being in several American films, she never did quite break into the American market. She herself claimed that to make it big in the States you have to come over early enough and she missed her opportunity. She is quick to add that perhaps she never really wanted to work in America anyway. It is a comment said with sincerity and not tinged, as some might think, with sour grapes.
Carice comes from a family of talent, Her younger sister is actress, singer and stage-designer, Jelka van Houten, her mother sat on the board of Dutch educational televison and her father was broadcaster Theodore van Houten. Currently Carice van Houten can be seen in the hit series, Game of Thorns.
Her former boyfriend is Sebastion Koch who played Ludwig Muntze in Black Book.
Koch has the very complicated task of playing what most consider as an oxymoron; a Nazi with redeeming qualitites. The role and a character would bring criticism to both Koch and director Verhoeven. His ability to give Muntze a full range of complexities and emotions solidifies his talents as a strong and important actor, in his country and elsewhere with the awards to back up this claim.
He appeared along with Liam Neeson in the thriller, Unknown (2011) and will appear as Gavinot in the upcomming film, Vivaldi due 2011 with Neve Campbell,
Alfred Molina, Tom Wilkinson and Jacqueline Bisset.
Thom Hoffman plays Hans Akkermans in Black Book. Hoffman has a long list of credits to his acting career including appearing in Lars Von Trier's Dogville (2003). His debut performance was in Luger (1982) where he worked with director Theo Van Gough (son of Vincent) who was murdered in a poltically motivated assassination. He has worked before with director Verhoeven in 1983 in the must-see thriller, The Fourth Man - a kind of Hitchcockian murder mystery pushed to excess.
Hoffman is also a noted documentary filmmaker who has tackled as one of his subjects, Dennis Hopper.
Black Book is Paul Verhoeven's return to the Netherlands. This is a film that he planned on making for many years, an idea that sprouted it's first roots in 1977 with Soldier of Orange. Verhoeven has a highly public, profitable and controversial career in America with films like the ultra-violent parody RoboCop (1987), Starship Troopers based on the Robert A Heinlein nove, Total Recal starring Arnold Schwartzenegger based on the Phillip K. Dick short story, "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale", the much maligned ShowGirls (1995) ( a movie someone should seriously consider making into a broadway musical), Hollow Man a retelling of the Invisible Man with Kevin Bacon, and Basic Instinct, the movie that made Sharon Stone famous for sitting on a chair, and had many gay-rights activist group crying foul for its depiction of homosexuals as psychotic .
Clearly Black Book is a very personal film for Verhoeven and marked his return not only to his homeland, but to a style and sensibility that was prominent in his early film.
His next film Hidden Force, is due for release in 2013.
