The centerpiece for Ufa's 25th anniversary celebration, Münchhausen offered Germans reeling from news of defeat in Stalingrad a welcome escape, "a film like the ones people used to make in the good old days. You could at times almost forget you were living in the Third Reich" (Curt Riess). The production granted therapeutic relief in the form of a tale about a man who masters his own destiny and marshals the march of time. The Agfacolor Münchhausen represents the Third Reich's consummate cinematic achievement. More than that, it enacts the definitive Aryan fantasy, the heroic myth central to Nazi self-fashioning. The protagonist's legendary powers become employed in Hitler's war effort, literally cast in the role of a wonder weapon, the illusory means by which the Ministry of Propaganda sought to reanimate a paralyzed nation. With its state-of-the-art wizardry, the film industry put German technical genius on parade and presented a compelling-and reassuring-triumph of special effects. Hans Albers played a Bombenrolle in which (two decades before Dr. Strangelove) the liar baron of lore became the cinematic equivalent of a V-2 rocket.-E.R.