The Bright Side of the Ax

The 25th Hour. One fine day in the summer of 1939, a young Rumanian farmer with an iron arm and a wooden head jumps happily into his hay wagon and goes rattling away to the nearest market town. "Keep the bricks wet," he calls out to his wife. "I'll be back this afternoon." She keeps the bricks wet, but he does not come back that afternoon. She does not see him again until the bricks and both their lives and all of Europe have been ground to rubble under the German jackboot.

In this pacifist parable based on C. Virgil Gheorghiu's 1950 novel, the peasant hero is presented as an inexorably cheerful Candide who earnestly tries to say something favorable about World War II but merely sounds like a man looking on the bright side of the ax that is cutting his head off.

The minute he arrives in town, the farmer (Anthony Quinn) suffers the first assault on his indomitable optimism. On orders from the local chief of police (Gregoire Asian), who would like to tear up the mazere patch with the farmer's wife (Virna Lisi), the grinning lout is arrested and shipped off to a labor camp for Jews. "But I am not a Jew," he protests. "My son," an old Jew replies gently, "we live in a world where any human being can become a Jew at any moment." That seems to satisfy this pea-brained pollyanna, who is blissfully happy to be a slave and can't understand why his companions aren't. "Look," he implores them, "look what a nice canal we're building!"

In Hungary a year later, the cheery clod is arrested once more. He is tortured by the Gestapo and condemned to a German labor camp, but he soon finds an excuse to see the misfortune as a blessing in disguise. Recognized by the camp commandant as a pure Aryan type, he is set free and inducted into the SS. After the war, to be sure, his SSimilation arouses suspicion, and he is sentenced to a long prison term. But then, he reasons, if he had not been brought to trial, his wife would not have seen his face in the paper and he might not have seen his family again.

All's well that ends well? The question is asked too often and too clumsily by a script that often muddles a magnificent theme and by principals who act as if they were reading the daily yoghurt-production report on Radio Bucharest. Yet in the film's final scene, the question is put again with inquisitorial ferocity. Reunited with his wife at last, the hero finds her a middle-aged ruin, with skin like cracked mud and a rapist's baby in her arms. In her eyes he sees the wreck that horror and hardship have made of him. At that instant, a newsman arrives to take a picture of them. "Everybody smile!" the photographer hollers with a snarling cheeriness that the horrified hero sees as a caricature of his own mindless optimism. "Keep smiling! Keep smiling!"

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