The New Pictures

Jubol (Columbia). "I like my coffee strong enough to float a pistol," somebody says to this movie's hero (Glenn Ford). The hero nods. It just can't be too strong for him, because he has the worst kind of trouble a hombre west of the Pecos can have--short of having his horse eat locoweed. He has woman trouble (Valerie French). It's bad enough that she is the boss's wife. What's worse, the boss (Ernest Borgnine) is Glenn's best friend.

Glenn wouldn't touch the girl, of course, no matter how much she wants him to. But one day she finds him in the forge and tries to fan the flames. "Keeping out of my way?" she taunts. Glenn just looks at her, level-like. "That's right," he mumbles.

The trouble with Glenn, as it turns out, is that his mother didn't love him, and the problem is cleared up as soon as he finds a pretty little prairie chicken (Felicia Farr) who takes him under her wing. The trouble with the picture, on the other hand, is caused by no lack of affection. The script is a sound piece of work, and Director Delmar Daves has generally made the most of it, and the most of some heart-catching country in Wyoming. What is wrong is the attempt to hitch a buckboard to a diesel. City thoughts from the 20th century keep popping out of these hayseed heads like fireplugs out of the prairie; and toward the climax, when Borgnine goes berserk with jealousy, the moviegoer may get a weird sensation that he is watching a production of Othello in ranch pants.

The Last Ten Days (Cosmopolfilm; Columbia) is perhaps the best picture produced in Central Europe since the war. Made in Austria, it was flung before the German people at the time their sovereignty was restored, as a brutal reminder of the price they paid for political folly, as a hair of the mad dog that bit them. Based on a book by Michael A. Musmanno, a U.S. judge at the Nuernberg trials, the film tells the story of the last ten days in Hitler's headquarters in Berlin, at the end of World War II. Facts are respected wherever facts are known, and the fiction is laid in with a sober sense of historical responsibility. Hitler is not ridiculed; Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote the film, and G. W. Pabst, who directed it, have had the good taste to realize that a man who caused the deaths of millions is nothing to be laughed at. Yet neither is the Fuehrer granted the Goetterdaemmerung he sought to stage.

In the cold concrete of the great bunker, the whited sepulcher of National Socialism, the moviegoer has the vivid sensation, for most of two hours, that he is buried alive. An unquiet grave. Teletypes chatter, switchboards mumble, telephones scream, messengers dart. Behind closed doors the generals wrangle: How much do they dare tell Hitler of how desperate the situation is? The politicians gather nervously for the Fuehrer's birthday party. Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Bormann, Speer--the likenesses are good enough to inspire shudders. Eva Braun (Lotte Tobisch), in her frumpy frock and country perm, might have stepped right out of the photograph on Hitler's desk.

Enter Hitler (Albin Skoda). The generals give him the bad news; he spits black bile and throws them out. Goebbels brings in the astrologer. "Im August Sieg!" At news of Roosevelt's death, the Fuehrer does a jig. When Speer and Goering try to tell him the war is lost, he vests command in the SS. A squad of Hitler youth, who have done men's work in the battles before Berlin, are marched in to be decorated. Hitler pats their cheeks, pins medals on them and gives each one an eclair. At night he gets an injection to put him to sleep.

In the canteen the nurses and the noncoms drink their beer and sing their sentimental songs. The generals have a little champagne. A young captain (Oskar Werner) rages to a brother officer: "Why does he surround himself with slimy yes men?" Eva's brother-in-law pleads with her for a pass to leave the bunker: "I can be loyal in Bavaria too!"

Nights and days run together. The Russians and the Americans meet at the Elbe. Hitler shuffles paper armies, daydreams in helpless fury of destroying the world. A moment later, the six Goebbels children are romping about their Onkel Adolf like pretty puppies. The young captain gets drunk and shoots off his mouth. Himmler offers peace without Hitler's consent. Eva's brother-in-law is shot, on Hitler's orders, as a deserter; and on Hitler's orders a Berlin subway, full of German women and children, is flooded to keep the Russians out of it. Thousands drown.

General Krebs, who does not like to kill people, has another glass of champagne and wonders if God exists. "It's quite simple," General Burgdorf says with bitter amusement. "If He did, we wouldn't." The Russians are two blocks away. Smoke pours in the air vents; death seeps into every thought. The angry captain gives Hitler a piece of his mind, and is shot for his pains. Adolf marries his Eva and prepares his suicide. "The German people," he says bitterly, "are not worthy of me." In the canteen a girl dances dreamily in a corner, starts to unbutton her blouse. In the conference room of Hitler's apartment, his aides wait tensely. The shot rings out.

The power of this picture is the power of the nightmare. The spectator is locked in the sinister bunker like Germany in its obsession, and the end is less an exit than a cure. Actor Skoda, for all the impacted passion of his playing, never really gets the number of the beast, but he manages to suggest both paranoia and genius, and he expounds the lesson of Nazi Germany as shockingly sometimes as if he had borne the head of the dictator through the theater on a pole.

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