Out of the kindness of his heart, and in the hope of achieving world peace, Lenny travels alone to Germany, and presents Hitler (Phil Pritchard) with a (mechanical) kitten in a box, which Eva Braun (Rosey Thewlis) opens and presents to him. Hitler is delighted and even sheds a tear. The encounter is all going swimmingly until they notice the Star of David hanging around Lenny’s neck, and Eva grinningly declares she’s off to fetch a knife. And then… well.
The manner of the filmmaking is very much in Russell’s late infantile stage – intentionally wooden acting, puzzling cuts and noodly synth music, of the kind that might accompany early silent cinema for free on the internet. Unfortunately, the film’s cheery ineptitude significantly impedes its main goal of causing maximum offence. It’s possible to watch it through the first time and be slow to catch the most salient plot development, which is that Lenny has been butchered off-screen, skinned, and turned into a lampshade for Hitler’s bedroom, with his necklace dangling down as a pendant switch.
On the page, this would undoubtedly have been clearer: I’d pay good money to see how Russell described it in his original script. On screen, it plays like a fluffed punchline he didn’t have the gumption to flaunt more frontally – an odd charge against the filmmaker who notoriously showed Vanessa Redgrave, as a hunchbacked nun, masturbating with the charred femur bone of Oliver Reed’s burned priest in The Devils (1971).
The truth is, Russell faced more censorship battles with The Devils than most filmmakers experience in entire careers. Warner Brothers refused to release that film uncut, and it has hardly ever been shown in its completed form. Next to that, A Kitten for Hitler is a tame raspberry of whoopee-cushion provocation, which seems to be sniggering behind the scenes at its own outlandishness. If it actually had the impact Russell was gunning for, there’s no way it would be sitting up there uncut on YouTube for all the world to see.
No one lynched Russell in the end; he died of natural causes in 2011. The easy availability of his swansong makes it very different from The Day The Clown Cried (1972), Jerry Lewis’s notorious, unfinished Holocaust picture, which has circulated only in bootleg copies for years. This was something else – hatched as a profound, worthwhile prestige project that simply misfired in every possible way, to the jaw-dropping astonishment of all who have seen it.
Perhaps the lesson Russell and his toy kitten taught us is that going out of your way to cause moral offence is never going to compete with managing it by mistake.
A Kitten for Hitler is available via YouTube
