Mother Night

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

It's no easy task adapting Vonnegut for the screen. And Gordon has done a fine job, remaining true to Vonnegut's prose and preserving the message: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” American playwright Howard W. Campbell (Nolte), living in 1930s Germany, agrees to infiltrate Nazi Germany as an American spy, becoming a radio propagandist broadcasting coded, anti-Semitic messages over the German airwaves. Twenty years later (when the film opens), Auschwitz survivors and a group of oddball white supremacists discover Campbell is still alive and pursue him, though for very different reasons. He lands in an Israeli prison and has some explaining to do: Was he a war criminal or a hero? A serious examination of mutable morality.