I was only partially enthused about the first half of this film. It would be interesting to someone into history — like “A Bridge Too Far” or a TV mini-series with Maximillian Schell. Then about an hour into it something grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let me go. Inside Hitler’s dingy blue-gray bunker during the last days of the Thousand Year Reich we are witness to the death throes of a sick ideology as it degenerates into drunkeness and suicide. Bruno Ganz plays Hitler teetering on dementia. He talks like Howard Hughes and looks like Ed Sullivan. He’s also nice to his secretary (before dictating to her how proud he is for making Deutchland Judenrein.) The New York Daily News’s Jack Matthews writes “But the very thought of humanizing Hitler makes me queasy. If he had a good side, I don’t want to know about it.” This is idiotic for two reasons. No one is going to come away from this film a Hitler fan. He dies as a stain on the couch, a miserable, Parkinson’s-shaken neurotic cursing the men who fought for him. Secondly, what makes Hitler fascinating is that he isn’t an alien monster taken from a DC comic. He was a human being. And, yes, he probably was sweet to his secretary. (Jesus was a human being, too, and people got bent out of shape when Scorsese’s “Last Temptation” showed him getting a hard-on. Hey — you gotta face facts.) To explore the human elements of these larger-than-life characters from history, names that create isms and anities, this is something only good art can do. And Hirschbiegel’s film is art. The tension in the bunker scenes ranks with, oddly, a film like “Das Boot.” And the performances here are incredible. Josef & Mrs. Goebells are remarkable. A chill shot through me as Goebells condemns the civilians of Berlin to death, because Hitler has decreed no surrender — and the peoples’ prior support of Hitler was a mandate that they would follow his orders to the end. The use of the current buzzword shook me — these political ideologies that lead to mass death, this is not far away history. This is happening today, in different forms, all over the worlds — and even just up the block from the Film Forum where I am watching this. (If you figure Film Forum and Fox News are both right off of 6th Ave in Manhattan.)