The 25th hour (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The 25th hour |
| Original title | La Vingt-cinquième heure |
| Country of production |
France Italy Yugoslavia |
| original language |
English French |
| Publishing year | 1967 |
| length | 123 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Henri Verneuil |
| script | Henri Verneuil François Boyer Wolf Mankowitz |
| production | Carlo Ponti |
| music |
Georges Delerue Maurice Jarre (anonymous) |
| camera | Andréas Winding |
| cut | Françoise Bonnot |
| occupation | |
| |
The 25th hour (original title La Vingt-cinquième heure ) is a French-Italian-Yugoslavian fictional film by Henri Verneuil made in 1966 in the Balkans . Anthony Quinn plays a man who is kidnapped during the Second World War and finally gets caught in the mill of labor camps and racial madness. The story is based on a 1949 novel by Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu .
action
Johann Moritz is a simple man who leads a simple but well-ordered, but hard life in rural Romania, characterized by numerous privations. One day, on the eve of the Second World War, the life of the peasant will be turned upside down from one second to the next, and at the end of the war he will be a completely different person, who will fall into the maddened mills of world history with his military and racial ideology Faults and were almost ground in them. Johann's misfortune begins when one day several military vehicles come to his village to collect the Jews from the area and to deport them. Johann Moritz, who is not sure what is happening there, is arrested and loaded onto the van. The completely perplexed, simple farmer vehemently denies being a Jew, he doesn't know that the policeman in his village denounced him against his better judgment and only because he absolutely wants Johann's attractive wife Susanna to himself.
From now on Moritz is no longer in control of the action, he is pushed around and instrumentalized and abused from all sides. First he ends up in a labor camp, where he has to work until he drops. Meanwhile, Susanna is forced to file for divorce so that she can at least continue to raise her children. Johann does not want to bow to his fate and is afraid of perishing sooner or later under the prevailing conditions there. He escapes from the camp with some fellow prisoners and arrives in Hungary, where the living conditions for Jews are said to be (still) reasonably bearable. But he is mistaken for a Romanian spy there, and Johann has to drive back to a camp where he is badly mistreated. Moritz survived this torture and was eventually deported to Hitler's Germany as a forced laborer.
Fate is only apparently turning for the better when an SS doctor, Colonel Müller, who conducts intensive race studies, discovers him and brings him to his home. Müller is very enthusiastic about Moritz, examines him very carefully, takes photos of Johann's skull shape and determines that Johann Moritz must be the epitome of the original Aryan. The racial purity, so Müller, is exemplarily documented in this farmer from Romania. From then on, the supposed Jew Moritz became the Germanic super-Aryan, and accordingly the face of the common man who does not understand what is happening to him is published in racial and propaganda publications. The madness even goes so far that Johann Moritz is brought to the Waffen-SS, which would supposedly do them credit. In this position, shortly before the gates closed in 1945, Johann Moritz was able to prevent disaster from happening to several prisoners of the Germans, and he transferred them to the approaching Americans.
The GIs instantly capture Moritz because the Americans believe they have made a particularly fat catch: a particularly horrific specimen of a criminal SS murderer. As a suspected SS henchman and war criminal, Moritz, who is completely overwhelmed by the allies, is finally brought to trial, which will only have a happy outcome for him years later. It was not until 1949, ten years after being abducted, that he was sent back to his homeland, to Romania, where his wife Susanna, who was meanwhile overjoyed because of the worries and fears about her husband and the rape by a Soviet soldier, welcomed him.
Production notes
The 25th hour was filmed in Romania, Budapest and Yugoslavia (outdoor shots) as well as in film studios in Munich and Paris and premiered on February 16, 1967 in New York. The film was first seen in Germany on October 27, 1967.
Robert Clavel designed the film structures, Rosine Delamare the costumes. Erwin Lange took care of the special effects. Claude Pinoteau served as an assistant director.
synchronization
| role | actor | Voice actor |
|---|---|---|
| Johann Moritz | Anthony Quinn | Hans W. Hamacher |
| Susanna Moritz | Virna Lisi | Anneliese Prichert |
| Nicolai Debresco | Grégoire Aslan | Toni Herbert |
| Traïan Koruga | Serge Reggiani | Rolf Schult |
| Colonel Mueller | Marius Goring | Fritz Tillmann |
| Mrs. Nagy | Françoise Rosay | Ursula War |
| Colonel Greenfield | Robert Beatty | Friedrich Georg Beckhaus |
| Prosecutor | Alexander Knox | Heinz Giese |
| Johann's defense attorney | Michael Redgrave | Max Eckard |
| Strul | Marcel Dalio | Hugo Schrader |
| Interior minister | Jean Desailly | Friedrich W. Building School |
| Isaac Nagy | Harold Goldblatt | Paul Wagner |
| Chairman of the court | John Le Mesurier | Konrad Wagner |
| Koruga, the village pop | Liam Redmond | Eduard Wandrey |
| Joseph Grénier | Albert Rémy | Gerd Martienzen |
| Inspector Varga | Kenneth J. Warren | Heinz Petruo |
| Soldier at Debresco | Jacques Marin | Gerd Duwner |
| Constantin | Jan Werich | Martin Hirthe |
Reviews
The international critics reacted to this film with rather mixed reviews. Below is a small selection:
The Movie & Video Guide found the flick "made indifferent, despite the stars' ability to act".
Halliwell's Film Guide called the film a "restless adventure" and found that "everything is a bit much".
The lexicon of the international film summed up: "In terms of subject matter and presentation impressive, but overall too superficial, routine-pleasing novel adaptation with pretentious pathos."
Cinema found: "Hardly any depth, but exciting".
Web links
- The 25th hour in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ The 25th hour in the German synchronous file
- ^ Leonard Maltin : Movie & Video Guide, 1996 edition, p. 1380
- ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 1057
- ↑ The 25th Hour. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed January 1, 2018 .
- ↑ Critique on cinema.de