Decision Before Dawn

Decision Before Dawn (1951) is a really remarkable film. A Best Picture nominee in 1951, it's been virtually forgotten today, but its mixture of gritty authenticity and a surprisingly well-rounded portrait of wartime Germany makes a unique and powerful film.

It's December 1944, and the Allies are preparing their final invasion of Germany. Intelligent Colonel Devlin (Gary Merrill) recruits German POWs as spies, including the idealistic Happy (Oskar Werner) and the embittered Tiger (Hans Christian Blech). Lieutenant Rennick (Richard Basehart) is assigned to join the Germans, though he distrusts their loyalty. Their biggest mission is to infiltrate the German X Panzer Corps, having received word that its commander might be willing to surrender. Happy does the bulk of the work, reverting to his old rank as a medical officer and slipping behind enemy lines, but he's quickly found out, hurrying to avoid the Gestapo and Allied air raids.

The late '40s and early '50s saw a number of down-to-earth World War II films, mostly from 20th Century Fox. Occasional flag-wavers like Sands of Iwo Jima were off-set by more grim and gritty fare like They Were Expendable and Battleground that celebrated unsung heroism without glorifying war. Decision Before Dawn goes a step further than these films, making Germans the main characters without resorting to grandstanding a la The Desert Fox and The Young Lions.

Director Anatole Litvak explored similar material in his much-later The Night of the Generals, an interesting if flawed account of intrigue and shifting loyalties in the Nazi high command. He shows a deft hand with similar material here, making his German protagonists believably complex. Happy is opposed to Nazism but has qualms about fighting his countrymen, while the perfidious Tiger might well be a double agent. In a gutsy move, Litvak focuses the bulk of the story on Happy, with his American counterparts backgrounded, allowing his mostly-German cast to carry the film.

The film avoids "good German" cliches by crafting an interesting vignette of life in Nazi Germany. German soldiers make small talk marching between assignments, POWs murder a pessimistic colleague, and Happy is called upon to help a sick German officer (O.E. Hasse) even when under suspicion. Vivid supporting players like Hilde (Hildegard Knef), a cynical woman whom (it's hinted) moonlights as a prostitute, and Scholtz (Wilfrid Seyfreth), a courier who switches between chummy drinking buddy and fanatic ideologue at the drop of a hat, make strong impressions. And that's not to mention the authentic French and German locations, still not rebuilt from the war.

Decision Before Dawn is superlative as a straight thriller, too. The film is long on plot and character but it's never boring, and really picks up after the main mission begins, with a wonderful degree of agonizing suspense. The movie retains the framework of a typical spy film but remains grounded in reality: our protagonists are gathering intelligence, not destroying Wehrmacht HQ, so the usual slam-bang action is absent. Most of the action is compressed into the last half-hour, with a tense chase through a bombed-out city and the spies' mad dash across No Man's Land, both perfectly-staged set-pieces.

Oskar Werner (Fahrenheit 451) gives an exceptional performance. Hans Christian Blech (The Longest Day) steals every scene as the scarred, cynical Tiger. Hildegard Knef gets a standout role as a believably tough, embittered yet vivacious German girl. Wilfried Seyferth and O.E. Hasse also make impressions in their smaller parts. There's even Klaus Kinski (Doctor Zhivago) in a very early role. American stars Richard Basehart (Reign of Terror) and Gary Merrill (All About Eve) are relegated to secondary roles.

Decision Before Dawn is a really great film. Avoiding the pitfalls of cliche and stereotype, it's both an excellent thriller and an unusual (for Hollywood) look at Nazi Germany.