This first-rate Second World War thriller marked Anatole Litvak’s return to Europe after 15 years. Shot entirely in Germany, it took him back to where his career as a director started. It even reunited him with one of his first cinematographers, Franz Planer, though unlike their previous collaboration in Nie wieder Liebe!, an unglamorous and muddy look defined the picture.
Written by Peter Viertel from the factually based novel Call It Treason, Decision Before Dawn unfolds in the final months of the war as, sensing the fall of the Third Reich, some German POWs agree to do espionage work for the American forces. Questions of betrayal and loyalty had clear resonance for Litvak who was once part of the film industry in Germany, was expelled from it, and later made propaganda films against it. The film was extremely mature and well ahead of its time, paving the way for WWII films with moral ambiguity around betrayal and heroism. It led to two Oscar nominations, for Best Picture and for Best Editing by Dorothy Spencer in her second of the three collaborations with Litvak. Filmed in the very ruins that had brought the war to a conclusion added greater authenticity, and this was enhanced by the participation of German and Austrian actors. It’s possible to spot Klaus Kinski in a cameo while both Oskar Werner and Hildegard Knef appear in their first American film.
Half an hour into the film, it’s no longer about the Americans but rather Werner as a soldier torn between defining his loyalty to his homeland either by fighting for it or fighting against it. He becomes like an ant in a devastated landscape, dwarfed by gigantic churches and other centuries-old public buildings converted into spaces of atrocity and treason. His existential dilemma in a historical situation, a purgatory in which the bravest and the most money-grabbing of humans find themselves in the same melting pot, harks back to films like Tovarich and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse but this time the bite and cynicism is deeply penetrating.

Ehsan Khoshbakht