Forbidden 1984

This 36-year-old TV film, directed by Anthony Page and written by Leonard Gross, is another worthy film to add to the small number that pay tribute to the all too few Germans who opposed Adolph Hitler. Like Alone in Berlin, reviewed in the May issue, this is set in Berlin. It is based on the non-fiction book by Leonard Gross The Last Jews in Berlin and stars the great French actress Jacqueline Bisset as the real life Countess Maria vol matzan. It is thus, as with Alone in Berlin, not a Holocaust film filled with scenes of brutal atrocities, but a love story about a woman who said "No." The title stems from the infamous Nazi Nuremberg laws that said all close contact between Jews and Aryans is forbidden, laws echoed in America dominated by Jim Crow.