New Picture

Decision Before Dawn (20th Century-Fox), like the controversial Desert Fox, goes behind enemy lines of World War II for a sympathetic view of a German soldier. But unlike Marshal Rommel, the new film's hero is no Nazi who turned against Hitler too late and for the wrong reasons. He is a sensitive young Luftwaffe medic (Oskar Werner) who becomes a U.S. spy out of convictions that outweigh his queasiness at being pitted momentarily against his countrymen.

Adapted by Scripter Peter Viertel from George Howe's Christopher Award-winning 1949 novel, Call It Treason, the. picture is a bang-up job of moviemaking. To tell the story of German prisoners of war who worked as U.S. spies, Director Anatole (The Snake Pit) Litvak goes the semi-documentary technique one better: he uses locations in 16 German cities and towns not merely as backgrounds but as living sets to re-enact the chaos of a battered, squalid Germany in the critical winter of 1945. The canvas is broad, the detail meticulous, the effect overwhelmingly real.

The movie also goes beneath the surface of Germany in the throes of imminent defeat. It contrasts the motives of Hero Werner ("Fighting against my people now is fighting for them") and a tough Wehrmacht sergeant (Hans Christian Blech) who works for the Americans "because you're winning the war." Werner's dangerous mission behind German lines to locate the position of a Panzer army develops into an odyssey through the German state of mind. Tormented inwardly by reminders of his old loyalties, he finds despair, spiritual decay, flickering compassion, Nazi brutishness and remnants of a severe Prussian sense of honor.

Decision Before Dawn mirrors these moods and mentalities in some excellent German players, notably Hildegarde Neff as a lonely derelict of war who has sunk into prostitution, O. E. Hasse as a colonel sternly loyal to his professional creed, Wilfried Seyfert as a virulent SS man. Apart from U.S. occupation troops cast as wartime G.I.'s, the only Americans in the film are Gary Merrill and Richard Base-hart, whose roles as U.S. intelligence officers put them in support of a fine performance by Viennese Actor Werner.

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