The biography of Kurt Gerron illustrates&nbsp;life under the Nazi regime in new ways.<BR>&nbsp;

The biography of Kurt Gerron illustrates life under the Nazi regime in new ways.

Prisoner Of Paradise is a documentary about Kurt Gerron, a Jewish cabaret artist, actor and film director who died in the Holocaust. Gerron was a large man best remembered by film buffs for portraying the owner of the club where Marlene Dietrich sings in The Blue Angel, though on stage he\'d played the lead role in The Threepenny Opera and immortalised the song, Mac the Knife. Before the Nazis won power in 1933 he had turned to direction, but unlike fellow film people - Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak among them - he stayed in Europe, moving first to France and then to Holland, where he resumed work as a cabaret entertainer. Eventually he was placed in a concentration camp at Theresienstadt, near Prague, and there he was ordered by the Nazis to direct a documentary that would show how idyllic life in the place was.Like the Alec Guinness character in The Bridge on the River Kwai Gerron seems to have leapt at the chance to prove his expertise, forgetting that what he was making was a piece of lying propaganda. It\'s an extraordinary story, very well told by directors Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender, and marred only by the use of voice-over, rather than sub-titles, for the numerous interviews with survivors from this painful period.