Last night I saw the film Schindler's List for the first time. It was shown on BBC1. Here are some reactions, roughed out immediately after it finished, and then cleaned up today.

For starters, I share the opinion of the Oscar awarding classes. I disagree with their decision to wait until this film before giving Steven Spielberg any Oscars, but not to have smothered this film in Oscars would have been very wrong indeed. And they did, of course.

What I particularly liked about this film is that for once, the immense apparatus of a Hollywood Mega-Production was applied to a task of comparable scale and significance to the scale (but insignificance) of the average Hollywood Mega-Production. It was recording not the adventures of some fantasy hero dressed in a circus costume. (I've just recently also seen Spiderman, and was underwhelmed, although no doubt that's just me.) Rather did Schindler's List record a small something of what the massacre of the Jews in the 1940s looked like and felt like, before all direct memory of these events had died with those who witnessed them. The money was not spent on big stars. It was not even spent on colour film. It was all of it spent communicating something of the scale of the ghastliness involved, and it was spent communicating this ghastliness in all its ghastliness with all the skills that Hollywood possesses.

I've seen as many cheap and perfunctory recreations of the Holocaust as I want to, thank you, with a few absurdly plump actors hurrying quickly into obviously non-gas chambers, their most intimate organs respectfully hidden from us. This time, dozens upon dozens of actors must have spent many days running about stark naked in among other actors dressed in military uniforms, and in the most undignified manner possible, because that's how it originally happened. This nudity – full frontal, private parts routinely revealed for quite long stretches – was, as the Hollywood saying so often goes, entirely justified by the needs of the story being told. Trouble was taken to find some people who looked sufficiently thin when naked. All this must have cost a fortune, or I damn well hope it did. But the Holocaust and its millions of victims deserved the full Mega-Budget treatment just this once, and I salute Steven Spielberg for having contrived this mighty memorial.

The sheer brutality of how the Germans involved behaved also needed to be nailed down on celluloid before all direct memory of that likewise died off. There have of course been books by the lorry load about these horrible events, but very few holocaust films, I think, and none that have been as technically polished and factually convincing as this one.

I wouldn't want to see Hollywood Holocaust epics every three years, and I don't say that Hollywood Mega-Productions should only be Mega-Profound and Mega-Worthy. I'm not saying they should never make Spiderman, etc. And I quite agree, before someone else says it, that Spiderman and the rest of them often also deal with weighty moral issues – "With great power comes great responsibility!" – even as our hero swings through the caverns of New York in a red and blue diving suit. But I'm glad that Hollywood also managed to make Schindler's List.

The film was characteristically Hollywood also in that it had a happy ending, and it was none the worse for that. It found a heroic saviours in the persons of Oscar Schindler and of his bureaucrat sidekick Itzhak Stern, and it found heroic survival in the form of the thousand or so Jews whom Schindler was able to rescue from the jaws of death, by stuffing death's mouth with money instead. The film did this partly because it did indeed all happen, and it did it partly because those are the Hollywood Rules. Schindler's List wouldn't have been nearly such an effective memorial if no one had wanted to see it.

But at the same time Schindler's List was, or so it seemed to me, a more than somewhat bitter reflection on the Hollywood tradition of the happy ending. Before we were allowed to witness our heroic rescues, the horrors were piled on with terrible and of course entirely appropriate savagery.

But then when the melodramatic rescues eventually came, they were as absurdly happy and fortuitous and heroic as the earlier scenes had been absurdly horrible and evil.

First we saw the senior Nazi of Krakow, Amon Goeth, shooting randomly selected Jews with his telescopic sights rifle from the balcony of his newly constructed villa, which was so ludicrously cruel that it could only have been true. And at the end we watched all the Schindler women – the men having already been saved – being taken by train to Auschwitz, and taken naked into what they (and I) assumed in terror to be a gas chamber, only to be given a shower of water, and then absurdly rescued by the absurdly heroic Schindler and taken away, again by train, from Auschwitz and reunited with their menfolk. And that too was so crazy that it also could only have been true. The final scenes of Schindler's List are as melodramatic as all hell, but you feel that Spielberg has earned the right to his melodramas by his unflinching presentation of the earlier horrors, and that we the audience have earned the right to our little pound of Hollywood Happy Ending, to soften all the earlier blows we have been forced and have forced ourselves to witness.

I got the feeling that Spielberg himself may have identified, albeit in a small way, with Schindler himself, in that, like Schindler, Spielberg started his career by making pots of money and honing his skills as a contriver of big events (in his case films), and then he collected together as much of his money and his skills and his friends' skills and as much time as he and they could spare, and threw them all at this film.

Spielberg took some some outrageous artistic risks, such as having a little girl wear a red coat and having some Jewish ceremonial candles at the end also in colour. Risking the wrath of critics with extreme gestures like that takes real nerve. He couldn't have been sure that Schindler's List would be either an artistic and critical success, or a commercial success, and if it had failed on either count Spielberg's career might have been severely damaged. But he went ahead with the film anyway, and made it the way he wanted to make it – without major stars, black and white with a few red bits, mega-budget, "arty" yet by the end shamelessly, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house over-the-top emotional.

I intend no disrespect to Spielberg when I say that I suspect him of consciously comparing his own relatively mundane circumstances with those of his hero. I do not accuse him of making a vainglorious comparison. Identifying with a hero is what we have heroes for. We all do this. If we don't, we should. Good for Spielberg for following Schindler's example if that is what happened.

And maybe Spielberg is comparable to Schindler in another way. At the end of the film we see Schindler breaking down in tears and berating himself for having chucked away so much money during his life, and for the fact that consequently he could only afford to save as many Jews as he did save. ("That car, that's two more people! Why did I keep it?") I wonder if Spielberg sometimes now lies awake thinking: if only I'd done it better, if only I'd had the money to hire that guy for longer and to reshoot that scene, and had found a way to include that ghastly episode as well without wasting too much time, and … Don't worry Steven, you did your best. You made a great film. The job you set yourself was done. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not Citizen Kane, Gone With The Wind brillilantly, but very well.

I'm very glad I got my TV reception digitised, because this has seriously improved my TV picture quality. Black and white films seem to suffer particularly from a blurry image. Like all great films, and I do believe that this is one, the way it looks is vitally important. All great films look uniquely like themselves, the exact way they needed to look to tell this particular story.

And I'm glad too that I have this little blog – so small as to be hardly more than a private journal – to record a few of my reactions to this film, which, I think, gives the lie to the claim that Hollywood isn't making great films any more. I'm not sure I'd have wanted to parade my humdrum little opinions about these matters in front of the 2,000 (and rising) per day hit rate of Samizdata. The low hit rates that blogs like this one get are usually regretted by their blogmasters, but I think that a low hit rate can have its advantages. You can think things through in relative privacy. You can think aloud, but not very loudly. Had I only had Samizdata to try to write this stuff for, I might not have written it at all. As it is, this little blog will give me and anyone else who cares about me a slightly better record of my safe and dull little life than would have been the case otherwise, just as Schindler and his Schindler Jews and all the other Jews now have their big nod of recognition and remembrance from the global cinema industry.

I missed the first few minutes. If only because of that I'll definitely be on the lookout for the DVD of Schindler's List, but will be hoping not to have to pay too much. I also possess the original novel by Thomas Keneally, and may even read it any month now, now that I will be able better to keep track of who everyone is.