Decision Before Dawn

Decision Before Dawn

Director: Anatole Litvak
Country: USA

1951 | 119 min. | English
Subtitles: German
FSK 12

Cast_ Richard Basehart, Oskar Werner, Gary Merrill, Hildegard Knef, Dominique Blanchar Screenplay_ Peter Viertel Camera_ Frank Planer Producer_ Anatole Litvak, Frank McCarthy Rights_ Park Circus

During World War II, a German prisoner of war risks his life to obtain top-secret information for the US military. A gripping espionage thriller about betrayal, morality, and the hope for a better Germany.

World War II, late 1944. Germany’s defeat appears near. The US military recruits defectors among German prisoners of war for a mission behind enemy lines. They need to reach a Wehrmacht general who is ready to surrender himself and his troops. One of the defectors, an idealistic medical student (Oskar Werner), is given the code name Happy. His mission is to spy on a tank battalion that could resist the general’s capitulation. The perilous journey back into his homeland confronts him not only with his fellow Germans (including Hildegard Knef) and their varying attitudes toward the regime, but also with his own conscience, seeing as, by the standards of the time, he is a traitor. The mission’s destination: war-ravaged Mannheim.

Director

Anatole Litvak (1902–1974) first worked at the Nordkino studios in St. Petersburg, from 1923 to 1925, and then became a successful director in Germany. He emigrated in 1933 because of his Jewish background, traveling via England and France to Hollywood. Numerous films by Litvak received awards, and he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Screenings