Normally, I avoid foreign films, unless they are dubbed.  This has nothing to do with personal tastes or prejudice.  While I watch movies, I take notes.  Doing so runs the risk of missing something if there are subtitles, and that would not be ideal.  Luckily, Blood & Gold (2023) was dubbed.  Further, while watching its preview on Netflix, I noticed a priest in a church.  Add in the fact that it is a history flick, and you have all the makings of something to get this Catholic reviewer’s attention.  My increasingly pacifist heart could have done with less of the first word in the title, but at least the majority of it belongs to Nazis?

Speaking of Nazis, Blood & Gold begins in 1945 in Germany with a company of Schutzstaffel (SS) troops chasing after a deserter from the regular army, a private named Heinrich (Robert Masser).  When he is finally caught, he is searched and found to have been highly decorated.  In questioning him, he admits to hating Nazis, having only fought because he was made to do so.  We later find out that, with the war turning against Germany, he had snuck away to reunite with his young daughter, the only surviving member of his family.  However dedicated Heinrich had once been makes little difference to the SS men, who leave him hanging from a tree.  Before he blacks out, likely to die, he is saved by Elsa (Marie Hacke), who takes him back to her farm.  Meanwhile, the SS carries on into the nearby town, which has been their destination all along.  Its population had seemingly forgotten about the war, its mayor, Bürgermeister Richard (Stephan Grossman), having to put the picture of Hitler back on the wall of his inn and dust off his party uniform.  He suspects that the SS is there for the gold.  In a subsequent flashback, it is revealed that in the late 1930s, the one Jewish family in town had been purged.  They happened to be wealthy, and their riches had been melted into ingots in the hopes that they could wait out the hostilities and enjoy the benefits in the aftermath.  With this knowledge in mind, it is remarkable that Richard keeps his composure when the SS’s leader, Lieutenant Colonel von Starnfeld (Alexander Scheer), requests to be taken to the burned-out home of the deceased Hebrew family.  Upon gazing upon the ruins, Lieutenant Colonel von Starnfeld orders an excavation to take place.  He also requests that his subordinate, Dörfler (Florian Schmidtke), take a squad into the surrounding land to search for supplies.  As they head out, Heinrich has been recovering in Elsa’s home, where he meets her Down syndrome brother, Paule (Simon Rupp).  When they see the SS approaching, Elsa tells Heinrich to hide in the attic.  After chasing after a few chickens, Dörfler enters the house and tries to rape Elsa.  Before the assault can occur, Heinrich emerges from hiding.  In the struggle, Heinrich and Elsa kill the SS men, but Dörfler manages to escape. Because of this, Elsa, Heinrich, and Paule have to make a run for it.  However, Paule is not happy about leaving the animals behind, particularly their cow.  As such, in the middle of the night he returns to their home and is there doing the milking when Dörfler returns.  Elsa and Heinrich witness from afar Paule being taken away and vow to free him.  Back in town, Lieutenant Colonel von Starnfeld’s search has proved fruitless, so he orders all the citizens to gather in the square to interrogate them.  They also make a spectacle of Paule, making him pose with the SS wearing a sign that reads “I am not worthy of life.”  It warms this Catholic’s heart to tell you that it is at this point that the local parish priest (Jochen Nickel) attempts to intervene and save Paule from execution.  Sadly, he is shoved aside and Paule is taken to the top of the bell tower to be hung from it.  He resists them, having a brief stand off before he is shot dead by Lieutenant Colonel von Starnfeld.  This happens just as Elsa and Heinrich arrive.  An enraged Elsa charges the SS officer, but he tells his men to hold their fire and is captured.  At the same time, Heinrich takes on another few SS toadies, a struggle that ends with Dörfler and Heinrich being strafed by American fighter planes.  Once more, Dörfler gets away, but Heinrich has sustained a serious shrapnel wound in his leg.  He is cared for by Irmgard (Petra Zieser), an older woman who lives next to the church and is friendly with the priest.  As he is recuperating, the priest visits and reveals the existence of the gold.  Once Heinrich can move enough, he goes with the priest to where he had hidden the gold in the altar of the church, unbeknownst to anyone else in the town.  This includes Sonja (Jördis Triebel), a resident who wants to keep the precious metal for herself and is willing to kill anyone in her way to get it.  As for Elsa, she has been forced to spend time with Lieutenant Colonel von Starnfeld, who has decided that she is to replace his Jewish girlfriend he had been “forced” to murder early in the war.  Waiting until he is asleep, she is able to obtain the cyanide pill from his SS ring and slip it into his mouth by pretending to kiss him.  She then escapes and gets to Irmgard’s place.  At the same time, Heinrich had gone to the inn hoping to trade Elsa for the gold.  Also, Sonja had found the priest and forced him to reveal the treasure’s location.  It all leads to a showdown in the church that ends with Elsa and Heinrich seemingly being the only ones to limp away.  I say “seemingly” because while Sonja had been wounded early in the battle, she awakens to recover the bars. However, she is blown up by an American tank while leaving town.  We conclude with Elsa and Heinrich reuniting with his daughter.

For all the gory violence in Blood & Gold, it is nice to see that it has a happy ending.  I wish I could say the same thing for the priest.  Indeed, there are a few aspects to his portrayal that should be addressed.  On the plus side is seeing him stand up to the Nazis on behalf of Paule.  For historical context, understand that Nazi Germany treated people with special needs as subhuman, and they were some of the first to be put into concentration camps.  The priest protests the sign that they put on Paule, and try to prevent the boy’s execution.  Also noteworthy is how he tried to hide the gold, using two of the Ten Commandments, the ones against killing and stealing, to admonish those who go looking for it.  He can say this because he witnesses what the townsfolk do to the Jewish family early in the war, though his reaction is not the greatest.  While he does voice his concerns in the moment, saying that the family are good people, he remains frozen in place as they are dragged from their home and their valuables stolen.  What I am less thrilled with is the suggestion that he shares a bed with Irmgard.  He is challenged on this point, but does not refute it.  Celibacy among Catholic clergy remains a topic that the broader culture cannot accept.  It is an effect of our post-sexual revolution society that has no problem with physical intimacy outside of the confines of marriage.  Please note that I am not advocating for a law.  Such punitive measures do not lead to evangelization, no matter what our current government might want you to think.  Overall, the priest is a good man.  As a practicing Catholic, I would have liked to have seen another positive trait to have been attributed like him maintaining his vows.

At any rate, I can avow that Blood & Gold is a pretty good movie, with some major caveats.  It is a violent movie with a lot of blood and gore.  At the same time, I have seen worse examples of this kind of material.  Finally, the right people triumph in the end, and that is worth something since we know that this is ultimately true with God.