‘American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally’ reveals much about a traitorous Portland native

Al Pacino in a scene from “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally” 2021. IMDb photo

Finally, we know what happened to Al Pacino.

He didn’t die in Sicily with that puppy dog sniffing around his hat.

Beside his run as a Nazi chaser in television’s “Hunters,” he’s been down in Puerto Rico.

In “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally,” Pacino stars as attorney James Laughlin (Al has finally sunk to being Irish), who is a veteran Washington attorney assigned to defend one the most unsympathetic real-life Americans from World War II. Her name: Mildred Gillars, better known in your grandfather’s day as “Axis Sally.”

Gillars, born in Portland, Maine, moved to Germany in 1934 and soon found work as a radio broadcaster there. By 1942, her English-language shows had turned unabashedly political. Brimming with Nazi propaganda, Axis Sally sought to make Americans fighting on European battlefields homesick and confused.

Gillars, played here by blonde starlet Meadow Williams, who, according to her press, came to Hollywood from a Tennessee farm in the ’80s and starred in, among other hits, “A Place Among the Dead.”

Williams bravely struggles through being raped by Nazi chief Joseph Goebbels, and trying Al Pacino’s patience, and her scenes playing an American woman and part time actress, living in Berlin at the beginning of WWII, who promoted herself into a job, reading sweet talk propaganda for the Nazis.

The drama about her life, directed by Michael Polish (“Twin Falls Idaho”), is based on semi-interesting script co-written by Vance Owen, which is in turn based on the book by his father Bill. The book has to be better.

To the G.I.s in the foxholes, Axis Sally was mostly a joke. They laughed at her corny pleas to throw down their weapons and go home.

Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Goebbels, was in real life to the British and American newsmen who met him, an oily icon of evil, with snake eyes and the table manners of Caligula. Here in Polish’s film, he is played by Thomas Kretschmann, simply as a thuggish well dressed businessman playing with a gold cigarette case.

This reviewer found Vance Owen and Darryl Hicks’ script to be a heart felt attempt at illuminating a sordid patch of history, while making a few bucks.

With hundreds of films on hand to cover, you might ask why I chose this clunker. It’s because I’m a fan of the great Al Pacino. I’d watch him play Elvis Presley in a nursing-home dinner-theater production.

No matter what he does that falls short of greatness, I just close my eyes and remember that moment in “The Godfather: Part III” when he sees his daughter shot to death in front of him. He lifts his eyes to the heavens as if to curse God; and with his head thrown back, mouth agape, the first notes of his scream die in his throat.

That, and his career-defining performance in “Dog Day Afternoon” remind us what Pacino is capable of.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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