The Art Of Hubris, in a Terrifying Form

The great actors have possession of their own shape of hubris; a unique combination of facial expression; the voice, and how it projects the actor's entity and how it inexorably fuses with the actor; the way the actor moves, and how the movements add to the total image of the actor's identity, and so on.
One of the most compelling examples of the total actor is one that may surprise you, as he is not from Hollywood, or out of J. Arthur Rank productions of England, or any movie or play cast.
The man is Adolf Hitler.
I am sure that many of you have seen pictures of a young Hitler, resplendent in a black suit or tuxedo, along with black tie and white shirt, in various poses representing the making of a speech, with that unsettling intensity blazing from his piercing eyes.
These photographs were taken by a brilliant photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who becomes the court photographer, and these photographs seem to connote the nature of a form of propaganda designed to enhance the Hitler image.
But they were more than that.
Few of us know what was on the other side of the subject, actually adjacent to Hoffmann's camera. That item was a full-length mirror, which Hitler constantly worked in front of in order to polish, to burnish the technique of what eventually becomes one of the twentieth century's most powerful and gifted speakers.
Like any artist, he practiced incessantly using the mirror and camera as his instruments, and not much later in time was able to enrapture about sixty million people at the apex of his power in much the same way a Cary Grant or a Katharine Hepburn or a John Barry more was able to take possession of their audiences.
The next time you see a Hitler speech, watch carefully for the total expenditure of sight and sound, and then consider how closely he brought civilization to a new Dark Age.

Was This a Calculated Moment, or the Opposite?

Please forgive the occasional digression from the arts, but I thought that I should share this moment in history with you.
The other day I thought that I would view chapter three of that wonderful documentary of 1973, 74 called "The World at War", which I hadn't seen in years. The section I was interested in was the surrender of the French to Hitler on June 21, 1940, at Compiegne, where the Kaiser surrendered to end World War I more than a generation before. It was in that old wooden railway car which so many of us have read about.
Hitler and his entourage were seated in the car, waiting for the French to enter.
When the French walked in, Hitler and his group arose, and here is where I found myself surprised, if not actually astonished, by what I saw (remember that the world and I have seen all this before on film many times) ; namely, that Hitler saluted in the universal manner (you know; arm crooked at the elbow, with hand to eyebrow), rather than with the Nazi salute, with arm shooting straight out at the usual upward angle.
I cannot remember Hitler ever having saluted in public before in the traditional manner. Is there another time that history has filmed such a salute from him? I know of no such picture.
Was Hitler feeling so avuncular at that moment(we know that he was in a joyous mood on that day, having reached what ultimately turns out to be the apex of his successes), that he did this purposely to"reach out" to the French for their "gallantry", or was it simply a reflex action going back to his days as a runner in World War I?
I can only speculate; however, it most assuredly was an unexpected gesture from a tyrant possessed with such vertical and obdurate ideology.