‘Condor’s Nest’ Becomes Latest Pulpy Addition To Golden Age Of Nazi-Hunting Media

The concept of punching Nazis in their stupid faces has endured for more than eight decades, ever since Steve Rogers socked Adolf Hitler on the front cover of Captain America #1. At a time when Europe was suffering under the truly evil policies of the Third Reich, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon opened up a cathartic release valve while German soldiers goose-stepped across Europe with ease, spreading the vile rhetoric of anti-Semitism and other forms of baseless hatred.

And even after the war ended and the criminals were hung at Nuremberg, there was still a lingering desire to deliver justice when it became clear that too many guilty parties responsible for the Holocaust fled once they realized their beloved Führer had failed to deliver his fabled “Thousand Year” dynasty.

Thanks to the efforts of Mossad, Simon Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds, Fritz Bauer, and other well-known Nazi hunters of the age, a number of wanted fugitives — most notably Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie — were found in their South American hidey-holes and made to stand trial for the murder of 11 million people (6 million of them Jews). It was delayed justice, of course, but justice nonetheless.

But even then, too many war criminals (Walter Rauff, Joseg Mengele, Aribert Heim) were never caught; never made to answer for their unspeakable crimes against the human race.

Others (like the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun) were knowingluy given asylum by Allied nations, in spite of their notorious activities in the 1930s and ‘40s. More preoccupied with fighting the Soviets than putting every single Nazi on trial once WWII came to an end, the American government enacted Operation Paperclip, providing citizenship and well-paying jobs to thousands of Nazi scientists, who had feverishly devoted their minds to Hitler and his twisted war machine.

So it’s no wonder that an entire genre of storytelling centered around thwarting and/or delivering justice to the Nazi menace began to take shape in the second half of the last century: Frederick Forsyth’s The ODESSA File, Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil, Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And as one century turned into the next, a new generation of filmmakers invited a pulpy and grindhouse-inspired sense of bloody vengeance to the party: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, David Weil’s Hunters; and now Phil Blattenberger’s Condor’s Nest.

“Here was an opportunity to do something classically American in the ‘80s, and ‘90s sort of pastiche, which is go watch some Nazis get their asses kicked and then infuse that with a revenge thriller,” Blattenberger, who both wrote and directed the film, tells me over Zoom.

Now available from Saban Films, Condor’s Nest follows Will Spalding (Jacob Keohane), a former American soldier who travels to South America in the 1950s to track down and execute the Nazi Colonel, Martin Bach, who murdered his fellow bomber crew during World War II. Said colonel is played by Imhotep himself, Arnold Vosloo.

“He just brings a weight and gravitas to the role that only a guy like that could bring. He’s a true thespian,” Blattenberger adds, stating that the goal was to avoid depicting Bach as “a classic, almost trope-ish TV Nazi. It’s so easy to take somebody who’s obviously incomparably awful and irredeemably bad and just have those broad strokes up front. We don’t want to do that. For a character to be truthful, he’s gotta believe he’s the good guy.”

He continues: “Of course, you’ve gotta be careful because you don’t want to give off the impression that you’re suggesting any kind of moral relativism here about Nazis potentially being good guys. But if a guy like Colonel Bach is gonna be believable, he has to believe he’s the good guy. So taking that broad approach here and then transferring to an actor, it’s a big load to take on. Arnold was able to step in and just take it on absolutely brilliantly.”

Throughout the course of his one-man mission, Will ends up joining forces with Albert Vogel (Al Pagano), one of Hitler’s preeminent atomic scientists, and Leyna Rahn (Corinne Britti), the Mossad agent looking to bring the weaselly Vogel to justice in Israel.

“A lot of credit goes to Corrine herself who took on the role … and the understanding that [this] was a trauma she never experienced, she’d never lived through,” the director says. “But [she] was able to take on the mantle of that lived experience and do the actor thing — take those voices and try to find a way to embody them in a meaningful and respectful way.”

While not Jewish himself, Blattenberger says he was consciously aware of the historical pressure points he’d be touching on with this project. “I think there’s a sensitivity you have to employ in trying to write about subject matter that’s deeply personal to somebody, but to you [it] might just be a fun story. There’s a heavy weight that’s incumbent upon a producer or a director to handle that sensitively.”

Will’s blood-soaked quest for revenge takes him to the farthest reaches of the South American continent where a vast Nazi conspiracy is brewing at the Condor’s Nest, a heavily-fortified compound occupied by Heinrich Himmler. The former head of the Schutzstaffel faked his own death in 1945 and has been amassing power ever since. If the image of a fedora and whip just flashed before your eyes, that’s no accident.

“It’s this broad geographic arc that certainly is Indiana Jonesesque in terms of its sweeping nature, [both] visually and on the adventure side,” Blattenberger explains. “And I think that was a deliberate choice, both in the screenplay, the production design, and a lot of the decisions we made along the way. Because obviously anything with Nazis reviving a political movement and attempting to take over the world again is inherently dark material … So yeah, there was this design to introduce this Indiana Jonesesque adventure and there are some little beats of levity that surface there.”

The majority of principal photography took place in the United States, but Blattenberger was able to capture a number of establishing shots in Peru, “which doubled for” Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile, he reveals. “We managed to show up right after Peru reopened. I had been to Machu Picchu multiple times and you can’t get so much as a single shot of anything in there without 300 shoulders in the shot. We managed to get in there when there was no one there because it was just reopening and got some really amazing footage. I think everybody’s gonna think it’s stock footage.”

When it came to recreating the look of ‘50s-era South America, Blattenberger went down a Google Images rabbit hole and reached out to “newspaper editors” and “cultural historians” familiar with the time period.

“What was the music? And if you saw political posters and advertisements hangings somewhere, what would those look like? What kind of cars were being driven around?” the director says, touching on the fact that there were no soundstages employed for this film. Everything was done on some sort of practical location.

“A lot of it was saying, ‘What’s here already that we can make fit?’ Okay, we have access to a classic Ford Sedan that we can sit in front of this bar. Were there Fords in South America in the 1950s?’ Sure enough, there was a Ford plant in Buenos Aires that opened up in the 1940s. So you can allow yourself to bring this item that’s available, set it there, and it’s not gonna look weird. Of course, a lot of that production design matriculates down to the level of a menu board written in Spanish, wine bottles that are Argentinian wine. All of that credit goes to the art department. That’s them grabbing all the little details that nobody else is gonna notice.”

Despite the fact that this movie is a complete work of fiction, Blattenberger hopes that viewers are inspired to do their own research into the historical events that inspired it.

“That generation is almost gone,” he concludes. “The generation of men that flew bombers in World War II is almost gone; the generation that survived the Holocaust is almost gone. Cinema is a way that we connect the historical past and these nodes of public memory and offer them to the younger generations.”

Condor’s Nest is now playing in a limited theaters. The film can be also be rented or purchased on Digital and On Demand.