Decision Before Dawn

Let this be a short and humble tribute to Hildegarde Neff.

"What's the matter boy, you don't want to dance?" He didn't. "With all your money, you should buy people drinks." He did. "You know, we haven't seen those kind of cigarettes for several years..." and so on, or something like it, until they were up in the hotel bedroom and he wanted her to leave because tomorrow was to be a big day of espionage and he needed sleep. She left cheerfully and he slept restlessly, and the lesson we all learned from this was that people aren't always what you first take them for. This is probably what Decision Before Dawn tries and fails to say, but the failure isn't Hildegarde's fault.

She is an incredibly beautiful woman with an unsymmetrical face. Most of the movie's fake German accents ring false but hers seems real. She has a wonderful aptitude for sizing people up, appraising who is good and who is bad, and doing something about it. She turns on the tears, proves a sound moral point, turns off the juice, and carries on. If Anatole Litvak, a great director of Swastikas and Spitfires, had concentrated on the good old theme of people--specifically the fascinating and irrelevant Hildegarde--he might have had a great movie on his hands.

As it stands, however, he has a long string of improbabilities laced with bad dialogue and characterization, particularly in supporting roles. What he has is a typically exciting spy-war-fare film with a couple of good performances. Oskar Werner, a blond and proud Nordic youth, comes off very well indeed because he has little to say, and no script-writer to louse up his sincerity. Everyone else--particularly Gary Merrill and Richard Basehart--acts in the best tradition of a class B film unit on location in Europe for the first time. This means lots of gutsy tough guys swimming icy Rhines, capturing Germans two-fisted, and helping motherly nuns rebuild their nunneries. The photography and Mr. Litvak's roman candles and firecrackers are very effective.

But not half so effective as Hildegarde, who inspires a certain desire to get on the next boat for Hamburg or Hollywood or wherever she breathes.