La vingt-cinquième heure

It was the first time Henri Verneuil had tackled a super production with international stars (Quinn,Lisi) with a lot of his compatriots in small parts :Serge Reggiani as an intellectual who thinks we are living on borrowed time (it was 1939) and it was the 25th hour (hence the title of the novel and of the film) ;Françoise Rosay as a Jewish mama ;Jean Dessailly as a government man ....

In France,Henri Verneuil is generally adored by the audiences and despised by the critics ;but there's a welcome tendency to restore him to favor nowadays ;after all who among us wouldn't have preferred a good old Verneuil flick to Godard's intellectual chores? I had seen "La Vingt-Cinquième Heure" when it was theatrically released and when I saw it yesterday after all this time,I must admit it holds up quite well.

This is the story of the wrong man at the wrong place :the film begins with a baptism ,a very important scene since all that follows is the story of a man who is sent to a labor camp because a man who covets his wife says he is a Jew .This is a subject which Joseph Losey will resume with his own "Monsieur Klein" .But Verneuil's work has a more universal feel :in every place he is ,he is always the wrong man,not only as a Jew.For the Hungarian authorities ,he is expendable ,since he is a Romanian .For the Nazis,extreme derision,he represents the "supreme Aryan superman".For the Americans ,he was friends (unintentionally) with the Germans ,so he represents the enemy.

Although Verneuil is not considered an auteur in France (French critics obsession with the Cinema D'Auteur,one of the diktats of the Nouvelle Vague),there are several scenes great directors could envy: the christening celebration ,with a wonderful use of Georges Delerue 's score inspired by Eastern Europa folk music ;the baby crying as Hitler is bawling out his speech on the radio;the prisoners picking flowers to decorate the train;the death of Serge Reggiani who gives his glasses to the hero because he's seen enough men; the photographs which are taken in the railway station,a sequence I have never forgotten.

This is a good movie about a poor guy ,caught up in man's madness and living through trouble times who never understands why .On a train to a labor camp,he is happy "to be on a train" .

I saw this film a number of years ago, but I still think of it now and then. I think that Anthony Quinn does a superb portrayal of a man caught up in series of coincidences beyond his control. He is a simple man, not a dolt, as some reviewers have opined. It is a story that could have happened to a number of people during that time. How many of us would have had completely altered lives if just one single event in our past had turned out differently? I would love to see the film again to see if I still thought that it is a terrific movie.

living in Romania, i was almost stunned by the very realistic setting for the scenes and the great care paid to local details by the director. The performance of Anthony Queen is absolutely great, and the rest of the cast does a great job supporting him. The movie does take a little knowledge of the east European context in order to be fully enjoyed, but it remains otherwise a great performance with some memorable lines. the ending is maybe a bit too melodramatic, but that's actually the way people are in this part of the world I believe the screenplay is great, because it presents the horrors of the 2nd WW in a most original manner - no blood, no battlefields. Still, lives are shattered, and the smiles you get every now and then throughout the movie are quickly killed by the war realities touching the characters.

There are many, many older movies that deserve to be transferred to the DVD format. This is surely one of them. An Anthony Quinn triumph! Scores of movies portray the victims of Nazi atrocities before and during the war, but, I don't think any of them have delved into the psyche of the victim and predator as well as this this one has. Anthony Quinn was truly a man for all seasons. He had the ability to portray the humblest of creatures devoid of any human vises to a creature of extreme animalism and pull it off as believable to the audiences who watched with no afterthought of what they had just witnessed! Truly one of our greatest artists. He is missed.

We don't know why this extraordinary film was never made available officially on DVD... Anthony Quinn's performance alone makes this a must-see. There are relatively few films in which an actor identifies so profoundly with his character, a phenomenon always unique for us, moviegoers.

But Quinn's powerful portrayal of an innocent Romanian, literally dragged out of his house and everyday life by forces he cannot comprehend, is only part of what makes this film great. The script is based on a book published in Paris by a Romanian priest who fled the Communist take-over of his country, and the film succeeds to go deep into a little known area of East-European history. Told as a succession of Kafka-esquire twists of fate, the misadventures of Johann Moritz (told openly and honestly, without any of the political correctness currently so precious in Hollywood) are in fact a eulogy for the lost innocence of the Romanian people... it is devilishly ironic that this eulogy is signed by a French director, working with the American money of an Italian producer, and overseeing a multinational cast fronted by an extraordinary Mexican-born thespian.

I've seen mentions of VCDs of this film in various Asian internet stores, and I was fortunate to take possession of a digital recording of this film, broadcast on the British version of TCM. But it's a shame that "The 25th Hour" isn't anywhere on the future DVD release map of MGM studios.