One of the greatest and harrowing films ever made has landed on Netflix for subscribers to sit down and watch the epic movie.
And at more than three hours in length, the drama scores a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score at 98 percent with critics and 97 percent with audiences.
It’s director, which is none other than Hollywood heavyweight Steven Spielberg, famously rejected his pay check for the film for a very good, and honourable, reason.
Over on IMDb, the film is ranked as the seventh best film of all time with a solid 9/10 rating, ahead of the likes of Pulp Fiction, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Forrest Gump, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
We are talking about the powerful 1993 classic, Schindler’s List.
The black and white film, which runs at three hours and 15 minutes, tells the story of Oskar Schindler. Played by Liam Neeson, it shows his journey as a businessman during the Second World War.
A member of the German Nazi Party, Schindler heads to Krakow on a business trip in the hope of making a small fortune.
Setting up a factory in the city, he employs more than 1,000 Polish-Jewish refugees as a way of bringing in cheap labour, with his mindset being about profit, not playing politics or harbouring grudges against people of a specific religion.
But that quickly turns to protecting their lives after the Nazis start sending Jewish people in the city in to a nearby concentration camp.
Thousands more are killed in the streets of the city as Germany begins to lose the war against the UK, the US, and Soviet Russia.
Ultimately, Schindler bribes SS officer Amon Goth (played by Ralph Fiennes) to transfer 1,100 people from the concentration camp to work at a new factory he wants to set up in the Czech Republic.
With help from his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), he ends up spending his entire fortune to keep these 1,100 people safe under the false pretence of working at a munitions factory, buying goods to make it look like he was producing them.
Despite Schindler’s List making more than $320 million (£256 million) at the box office and being a commercial success, its director Steven Spielberg refused to make a penny from its production.
Spielberg, who is Jewish, said: “Let’s call it what it is. I didn’t take a single dollar from the profits I received from Schindler’s List because I did consider it blood money.
“When I first decided to make Schindler’s List I said ‘if this movie makes any profit, it can’t go to me or my family, it has to go out into the world’.”
The director instead used his money from the film to established the University of South Carolina Shoah Foundation, which preserves interviews with holocaust survivors and witnesses.
Filming the movie ‘changed his life’, as Spielberg added: “Filming just outside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I realized that had I been standing on that exact spot at a different point in time I more than likely would have been killed too.
“I remember talking to a lot of survivors during the production. It was one of the first moments that made me realise there were many, many stories that needed to be told.”
Schindler’s List arrived on Netflix on 1 January and can be watched with a subscription.
