Director: Anatole Litvak
Writers:
George Howe (novel)Peter Viertel (writer)
Within the inflexible framework of a straight undercover spy film, which in this case goes by the title of "Decision Before Dawn," Twentieth Century-Fox and Anatole Litvak have packed not only lots of thrills but a clear and cold look at Western Germany in the last year of World War II. They have also worked into this thriller, which opened at the Rivoli yesterday, a persuasive amount of compassion for a German soldier who turns traitor on his own.
Lest this sequential information should lead anyone to suppose that the produce
rs are up to something such as the recent "Desert Fox," let this be acceptable assurance that there's no fraud in "Decision Before Dawn." Neither is there endeavor to whitewash the guilty or corrupt.
The humble hero of the adventure that is tensely unfolded in this film is a young German medical corpsman who has been, captured just west of the Rhine. On giving reliable indication that he is willing to serve as a spy, he is trained by American Intelligence and then dropped behind the German lines to locate and report the position of a panzer division that supposedly wants to quit. The major part of the story is of his adventures behind the lines.
And it is in this phase of the story that Peter Viertel, who wrote the script, and Mr. Litvak, who directed (as well as co-produced), have packed as stirring a drama as any you'll want to see, as well as a fair approximation of a nation's moral collapse. For in the soldier's narrow encounters while posing as a loyal Luftwaffer on leave, in his fortuitous meetings with German civilians in the depths of despair and in his fearful observations of the brutality of the Nazis' death-grip are caught not only twanging tension but a sobering sense of profound fatality. That which we see is the consequent degradation of a conqueror's shattered dreams, and the fact that the soldier is finally swallowed up in it completes the sense of doom. There is plainly no sentimentalizing, no passing the buck in this film.
To assure himself of authenticity, Mr, Litvak not only checked his script with the proper military authorities, but he went right to Germany and photographed his story in its shattered cities and still uncovered ruins. Here are the gaping shells and rubble in which the Germans lived the last years of the war, here are the broken bridges, the barbed-wire "check points," the crumbling autobahns. And here, in a cast of German actors, Mr. Litvak has reproduced some various types of Teutons that went down the Nazi drain.
First, there is Oskar Werner, a young actor from the Viennese stage, who does a remarkable job of making the hero a solid human being—a lad of very tentative courage but of decent instincts, none the less, who assigns himself to be a traitor and goes through with it because he thinks it best; Then there is Hans Christian Blech, who does an equally fine but briefer job as a suspiciously treacherous ex-criminal who also turns traitor for the gold.
As a watery-eyed "hostess' in a German cafe, Hildegarde Neff is affecting, too, conveying the pathos of desertion without making any piteous appeals. And, as assorted Nazi soldiers, Wilfried Seyferth, O. E. Hasse and several more give convincing illusions that you are seeing the genuine things.
In the roles of American officers who operate the intelligence machinery with impressive élan and efficiency, Richard Basehart and Gary Merrill put starch into the first part of the film. Only Dominique Blanchar is unconvincing as a French underground glamour girl.
True, there's nothing morally elaborate or conclusive about "Decision Before Dawn." But it packs some impulsive excitement and it plants a seed of understanding in the mind.
DECISION BEFORE DAWN, screen play by Peter Viertel, based on the novel "Call It Treason" by George Howe; directed by Anatole Litvak; produced by Anatole Litvak and Frank McCarthy, for Twentieth Century-Fox. At the Rivoli.
Lieutenant Rennick . . . . . Richard Basehart
Colonel Devlin . . . . . Gary Merrill
Happy . . . . . Oskar Werner
Hilde . . . . . Hildegarde Neff
Monique . . . . . Dominique Blanchar
Oberst von Ecker . . . . . O. E. Hasse
SS Man Scholtz . . . . . Wilfried Seyfert
Tiger . . . . . Hans Christian Blech
Fraulein Schneider . . . . . Helene Thimig
Paul . . . . . Robert Freytag
from: NYTimes
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