FILM

Holocaust Museum Houston will present a public screening of the thriller The Odessa File, the classic movie about the adventures of a young German attempting to discover the location of a former SS concentration-camp commander during World War II, as part of this year’s Fall Film Series. The film will be shown Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011, beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the Museum’s Albert and Ethel Herzstein Theater at the Morgan Family Center, 5401 Caroline St., Houston, TX 77004 in Houston’s Museum District.

Holocaust Museum Houston’s Fall Film Series will feature three early cinematic dramatizations that helped shape the memory of the Holocaust in popular consciousness. All the three films do what great Holocaust movies should: they take a dark time in history and weave a narrative that makes us understand what we didn’t know before. They educate more than they entertain, but they do it with compassion, humor and even the plain harsh truth.

From the book by Novelist Frederick Forsythe, “The Odessa File,” starring Jon Voight and Maximilian Schell, is a suspenseful story which takes the audience from Berlin to a World War II concentration camp called Riga. Peter Miller, a German journalist, stumbles upon the diary of an old survivor of the Riga concentration camp and learns that the commanding officer of that camp - Eduard Roschmann - is still alive in Germany under a pseudonym.

While trying to pinpoint Roschmann, Miller will have to face ODESSA (Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen), an organization of Nazis who haven't given up the idea of ruling the world. Helped by Simon Wiesenthal and Jewish secret agents, Miller tries to sneak into ODESSA but is soon the target of the ODESSA killers. Fortunately, Miller has the opportunity to steal a file which lists the new identities of all the ODESSA members.