Of Pure Blood (1986 TV Movie) User Reviews (3)

Perfect American beauty discovers she has an ugly origin

[Moor-Larkin · 7/10 · 25 August 2005]

I had to double-check the date of this film when confronted by a McGoohan at least twenty years older than I had expected! Thankfully it was just the make-up department! He plays a kindly old professor who turns out to be too good to be true. Once again McGoohan has been lumbered with a dodgy accent. He really ought to stick with his own voice, it is so unique it could be from any place anyhow! He offers succour and help to the distraught Lee Remick whose stunningly perfect looks are perfectly cast as one of the Nazi 'Lebensbaum'.

Remick plays an American beauty with a perfect life, heading up a model agency. Then one day her perfect life is shattered by the mysterious death in Germany of her son. She discovers she has a grandson. In her travels she unearths some bizarre information about herself. Back home she confronts her mother, who has hidden Remick's true origins from her. The emotional fragmentation of the mother is juxtaposed against the haughty disdain of the wronged daughter that reveals the 'Kruppstahl' in her genetic inheritance. Later, however, Remick has her own disintegration as she recognises that ruthlessness in her personality, finding herself choosing "perfect children" at the modelling agency she heads.

McGoohan turns out to be the brother of Remick's father and has hero-worshipped that soldier all his life. He has also been part of the conspiracy all along. He is revealed as a eugenicist and racialist but more intriguingly, in the final scene, he suggests the pathology in his mind that has allowed him to rationalise those views, unlike the one-dimensional evil Nazi that is the pursuing doctor.

McGoohan reveals a true love of his niece that overrides his loyalty to the programme. He wins the freedom of Remick and her grandson. McGoohan delivers an arresting performance in this final scene as the mundane professor is revealed to be a tangle of contradictions.

The film is generally well put together with some excellent cinematic techniques mentioned by the previous reviewer. The tentative introduction of a potential love interest for Remick seems to jar with the overall more subtle tone of the film. He first appears on a German train in a scene including, weirdly, some Union Jack be-decked London skinheads?! The whole thing smacks of a clumsy addition. That apart the film moves along gracefully and it is moving to watch Remick in the knowledge she was to die so tragically early in 1991.

McGoohan also adds yet another beautiful woman to his list of co-players, memorable ones include Belinda Lee, Melina Mercouri, Virginia McKenna, and Sylvia Sims. How lucky can one man be?

leibensbaum Lee

[petershelleyau · 24 February 2002]

Lee Remick is Alicia Browning, a New York City casting agent who learns of the death of her son Mark (Robert Bowman) in Germany. In Germany, she discovers what Mark had - that Alicia is a child of "leibensbaum" - German for "fountain of life, Himmler's program for the breeding of pure Aryans - and that Dr Grigor Bamberg (Richard Munch) has arranged for Mark to father a child Maria to continue the blood line. What will happen to the child? Remick's natural Aryan looks and somewhat mechanical manner makes her perfectly cast as a leibensbaum child, and Alicia's outrage at her identity being a shame and having her grandchild at risk gives Remick plenty of anger to play. The scene where her mother Erika Muller (Edith Schneider) tells Alicia of how she was impregnated by the SS Officer Carl von Lubich who disappeared at the end of the war works more because of Schneider's playing than Remick's stiff reaction, though Remick has a good scene where she becomes hysterical at the realisation of her arbitrary rejection of children at a casting session, hugging the children around her and crying for forgiveness. The teleplay by Michael Zagor and Del Coleman, suggested by a book by Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry, has elements of Ira Levin's The Boys of Brazil, but on a lesser scale. The irony of the Steinhem house where Alicia was born and raised until she was 5 now used as an institution for handicapped children is mentioned more than once , but Erika's model recreation exists to be smashed. Director Joseph Sargent presents such a fascinatingly gothic tale that we can overlook aspects like McGoohan's German accent and old man makeup, Alicia's nightmares of Steinhem, and even the jump cuts of Remick crying when she learns her real father was a war criminal. Sargent cuts from Mark's dead perfect face to head shots at Alicia's casting agency, uses an effective music score by Brad Fiedel, and continues the telephone conversation dialogue from one scene over the visuals of another.

This made me learn

[Col_Hessler · 8/10 · 18 November 2005]

I was intrigued by this movie when it premiered when I was fifteen. The Nazis and all of their ugliness is magnified when I read up on the "Lebensborn" program. And, when I read about how Himmler expected his SS men to have at least four children, I saw why this is a good movie for people to see and for them to go on and investigate this facet of the Nazi era. Enough about that. Lee Remick was a great piece of casting for this. She had the Aryan look, as the old bankers reaction tells us. Also, Patrick McGoohan was a terrific choice, being able to make his change of heart believable. Best of all, as others have mentioned, is when Remick has her breakdown. When she starts trying to hug all the children and keeps saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" That's some good skill, making that work without going over top. Get a copy of this and see it.