‘Christabel’ Looks at Nazis Through the Eyes of the Aryan Middle Class

Behind the opening sequence of “Christabel,” a scratchy 78 r.p.m. record plays a ‘30s-style ballad and a young woman croons “whatever you do, I’ll be following you.”

The device--popular music used to comment on a time, a place, a situation--is as near to a trademark as any television dramatist has, and it belongs to Dennis Potter. He used the cheerful banality of pop songs as a savage counterpoint to the finally tragic goings-on in “Pennies From Heaven,” first on television and then in the Herbert Ross film version.

Again in “The Singing Detective” (the most potent and imaginative television I saw in all of 1988), Potter’s use of popular music was ironic, hallucinatory, alternately funny and terrifically affecting.

This time, Potter was adapter and executive producer of “Christabel,” the new “Masterpiece Theatre” miniseries starting Sunday night and continuing on the three following Sundays (8 p.m. on Channels 50 and 24, 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15).

The series is based on “The Past Is Myself,” the autobiography of Christabel Burton, an English deb who in 1934 married a young German lawyer named Peter Bielenberg, whom she’d met at Oxford. She settled with him in Berlin. They had two sons, and she elected to stay on with Peter in Berlin after the war began. Thus, as an enemy alien, she was a unique witness to the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

She was the niece of Lord Northcliffe, the Irish-born newspaper proprietor who founded the Daily Mail and who owned The Times of London for many controversial years. The relationship was to prove important to her later.

The cheerful tune plays as the limos pull up to the Burton country estate for the wedding. Christabel, portrayed by Elizabeth Hurley (the very model of the English rose), admires herself in her wedding gown, chides her distraught mother and ignores the pleas of her German-hating father to call it off while there’s still time.

Things were already out of tune in Germany, but love is blind and Christabel is made to appear so blithely and even flakily unpolitical that she might have been blind to the situation even without love.

As always, British television--in this case the BBC--has an enviable gift for mounting period pieces and capturing a you-are-there feeling, as opposed to a suspicion that it has all been erected on the back lot.

“Christabel,” directed by Adrian Shergold and shot in Austria, Hungary and Scotland, brings back the swastika-draped buildings, the burning of the synagogues, the bully-boy Brown Shirts taking over the streets, the dark and heavy houses of the quite rich. The production values are amazing.

The interest of “Christabel” is that it does offer a different viewpoint on the Nazi period. When the war began, Christabel took their two small sons home to the English countryside for a while, but quickly decided their place was back in Germany with Peter (Stephen Dillon).

Thus the contrasts and anxieties of the prewar years, the onset of war itself and the last days of the Third Reich are experienced through the lives of the safely Aryan upper middle class, who were, in Peter’s circle of friends, patriotic but anti-Hitler Germans.

Peter gave up law for a minor job in the Foreign Office. Later he was arrested and imprisoned at Ravensbruck concentration camp for his part in the unsuccessful bomb plot on Hitler’s life. In the series’ best and most suspenseful scenes, Christabel visits the camp to plead with a Gestapo interrogator for her husband’s life.

Unfortunately, after the provocative opening of the series, the demands of straight historical narrative defeat Potter’s unique ability to mix reality, fantasy, dream and memory. There is a nightmare sequence; yet, as it plays, it is curiously perfunctory.

The unfolding, including trite voice-over reprises of the dialogue, is merely competent, although Shergold handled the often elaborate logistics of the series with considerable skill. But his infatuation with Hurley’s beautiful face, often seen in extreme close-up, impeccably made up, keeps evoking the Hollywood ‘40s rather more than the German ‘30s.

“Safe home!” Christabel whispers at the departing Allied bombers after a raid, and later tosses oranges to a work crew of English prisoners of war. Her divided loyalties--Peter on the one hand, England on the other--are thus simply set forth. Dillon as Peter has less chance to express his own turmoil, although he looks handsomely intense throughout.

Even at four hours, “Christabel” offers only a teasing glimpse of a potentially interesting human drama (or the crackling melodrama it tries to be). Most disappointingly, there is only a teasing taste of Potter’s richly individual imagination.

Kenith Trodd, who works frequently with Potter, produced. Alistair Cooke is the urbane host as usual.