Decision Before Dawn

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Richard Basehart and Gary Merrill star in a film that?s ?as stirring a drama as any you'll want to see? (The New York Times). Adapted by Jack Rollens and Peter Viertel from George Howe?s novel Call It Treason, and directed by Anatole Litvak, this riveting World War II drama was nominated for the 1951 Best Picture Oscar®.

As the Third Reich declines in power, the Allies develop a radical new plan ? to employ German POWs as spies. Led by American Colonel Devlin (Merrill), and executed by Lieutenant Rennick (Baseheart), the plan is risky, and the tension builds as the Americans learn whether the former Nazis will help or betray the Allies.

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Description




Rooting for a German soldier was a daring choice for a movie made in 1951, but Decision Before Dawn justifies the risk; this is a crackling good war movie. In late 1944, the Allies are pushing through Europe but need intelligence behind German lines. Two Americans (Richard Basehart, Gary Merrill) recruit German POWs and enlist them to spy on their former Fatherland. We follow the adventures of one such agent, arrestingly played by the young Oskar Werner, who parachutes into Bavaria and gathers information. (Oddly, the film abandons Basehart and another recruit, marvelously played by Hans Christian Blech, who have also gone under cover.) The well-deployed suspense is accompanied by a constant examination of what it means to be German, and what loyalty to one's country really entails--dutiful devotion or skeptical rebellion? This question doesn't go deep (there's a sense that the movie is a make-nice effort toward a new economic ally), but the film is on solid ground whenever the clockwork suspense takes over. Hildegarde Knef (here billed under her Hollywood spelling, Neff) turns up as a conflicted fraulein. Director Anatole Litvak, shooting on location, gets some amazing shots of bombed-out buildings and ruined towns; in that sense, the film is almost like a documentary record of the postwar landscape. Decision Before Dawn was nominated for the best picture Oscar, but became a lesser-known film in the decades that followed. It deserves a higher profile. --Robert Horton


Decision Before Dawn Customer Review


There are a jillion Second World War movies out there and most of them you'll enjoy if you like the genre. I really don't care much for the genre and yet this one really grabbed me. Why? As you can read many places it is the story of an idealistic young German soldier whose ideals are rather easily turned 180 degrees after being captured by the Americans, and who returns behind enemy lines as a spy. I don't know enough about WWII history to say with certainty that this actually happened but I'd bet money it did.

While the movie's traditional values are all operating at high levels, I think it is the psychological struggle of young Maurer (Oskar Werner) that really drive it. Watch his performance as he phones his father at the hospital and then hangs up. Or when the girl comes upstairs to spend the night and notices the strange brand of cigarettes. Or, I think most specially, when he is forced to perform medical procedures he's not qualified to. It all makes for some intense viewing, more than just cheap suspense. The temptation to return to his own people is strong against this mercurial, mysterious personality who claims to be 'weary of the war'. Experience the joy of paranoia.

There are certainly other reasons to recommend this film. Its depiction of interwar Germany as bleak and wintry in B&W may in some sense be part of the bias of its day, but in many ways it precedes the aesthetic of Schindler's List.

There is some fine acting to be seen by lesser names such as Wilfried Seyferth (as Heinz), O.E. Hasse (as Col. Von Ecker) and Werner himself. There is, of course, the unavoidable patriotic hamfistedness of the times, and the occasional lapse in character (which I think you'll agree are the product of the day's conventions) but all in all I consider it a fine meditation on the struggle between personal ideals and national ideals. This on one level, and on a more personal level, the struggles of a mercurial personality.

"Many a road to the Rhine, many roads to death!"

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