Desperate Moment

A surprisingly neglected and unknown Dirk Bogarde thriller well up to the standard of Carol Reed's war dramas. Dirk is a Polish prisoner accused of having murdered a British soldier, but the case is much more complicated. He is actually Dutch and lives only for the beautiful Mai Zetterling, and when he hears she is dead he doesn't care for anything any more but willingly confesses to the murder to save his friends, four fellow prisoners. This is only the introduction to a very tight thriller, mainly taking place in bombed out Hamburg and Berlin. The settings and atmosphere is very much the same as in Carol Reed's "The Man Between" with James Mason of the same year. Dirk Bogarde is no James Mason, but the thriller here is even more interesting and above all more romantic than in Carol Reed's parallel Berlin film. Both succeed in catching the monumental desolation of Berlin after the war and its fathomless tragedy of ruins and consequently compliment each other perfectly.