Black Book Review

There's something about the violent proclivities of Paul Verhoeven's best work that belongs forever to late twentieth century America. Robocop was a Republican's wet dream of corporate quagmires and zero-tolerance policing. Starship Troopers both aggrandised and attacked the excesses of American foreign policy. Showgirls and Hollow Man showed a man out of time and possibly out of his mind. Since then Verhoeven has stomped home to make "fruity films about suffering", to paraphrase Barton Fink, another outsider artiste adrift in LA.

Reassuringly, Black Book proves you can take the man out of Hollywood but you can't take Hollywood out of the man. Verhoeven may have been aspiring towards making a female-fronted Schindler's List, but the result is an audacious, expansive war romp focussing on an intriguing Indiana Jane rather than the usual GI Joes.

Convoluted rather than complex, the piecemeal plot concerns Rachel Rosenthal (Van Houten), a Dutch Jew hiding from the Nazis during the dark days of 1945. To cut an (over) long story short, Rachel loses her safehouse in a bombing raid, her family in a hail of SS bullets and her identity as she changes her name, dyes her hair (collar and cuffs) and joins the resistance. Her mission? To spend as much time as possible in the buff as the plaything of a stamp-collecting Nazi (Koch) while sabotaging the German war effort.