Until The Last Hour

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Until The Last Hour is the title of a US feature film that was planned by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film studio in the 1960s , but was never shot. His almost completed script tells the story of NSDAP member Oskar Schindler , who saved over 1,000 Jews from being exterminated by the National Socialists during World War II . Efforts to make it into a film resulted in Schindler being honored with the Federal Cross of Merit.

history

The Schindler Jew Leopold Pfefferberg emigrated to the United States after the Second World War and lived in Los Angeles . Endeavoring to make Oskar Schindler's rescue efforts during the war known to a wider public than had previously happened, he came into contact with Martin Gosch , a screenwriter and close collaborator of Robert O'Brien , the president of the Metro-Goldwyn film studio , in 1963/64 -Mayer. Gosch acquired the rights for himself and MGM from Oskar Schindler to film his story. MGM then had Gosch collect material for the script from around the world and interviewed Schindler Jews for it. Howard Koch was brought in as co-scriptwriterDelbert Mann was hired as a director and Richard Burton and Romy Schneider were scheduled for the leading roles . The budget for the planned film was $ 9 million. The script was almost finished by mid-1965 and shooting was scheduled to start in December 1965. In order to highlight the achievements of Schindler and to promote the film, Gosch even had the film advertised by MP James C. Corman in a speech to the US House of Representatives . However, it was never made into a film because MGM announced the end of the project in October 1965. Gosch stood up for Schindler at the German consulate in Los Angeles - as a result, Schindler received the Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class, in 1966 .

The Frankfurter Rundschau speculated in 1994 about the reasons for the lack of filming that MGM had not wanted to provide the Germans with a hero behind whom a “meager coming to terms with the Nazi past could possibly have hidden”.

After the termination of the film project, MGM retained the rights to the film adaptation of Schindler's story. When Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's List was published in 1982, the author therefore had to commit to assigning ten percent of the license fees from book sales to MGM. The book in turn became the basis for the documentary Schindler (1983) and Steven Spielberg's feature film Schindler's List (1993).

literature

  • David M. Crowe: Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activites, and the True Story Behind the List , Westview Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-465-00253-5

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Crowe 2007 (Kindle edition), Item 11565 ff.
  2. ↑ Claudia Keller, Stefan Braun: "It has to be a film that is also successful" , in: Stuttgarter Zeitung of October 23, 1999, p. 5, accessed online via GBI-Genios on May 16, 2020
  3. ↑ Martina Thiele: Journalistic controversies about the Holocaust in film , LIT Verlag , Münster 2001, ISBN 3-8258-5807-3 (dissertation, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen , as PDF accessed from the website of the University of Göttingen on Sep. 3. 2020), p. 422 f.
  4. ↑ Marco Giannangeli: The long list of problems that nearly sunk Schindler's List , in: Daily Express and Sunday Express web presence of April 7, 2013, accessed on May 30, 2020