Cinema: It’s That Mann Again

The Condemned of Altona. Hating Hitlerism is like opposing poison ivy. It is a sensible thing to do, but at this late date it is a difficult thing to do in an original or even interesting way. In The Condemned of Altona, a five-act drama produced four years ago in Paris, Philosopher-Playwright Jean-Paul Sartre almost turned the trick. His play transformed turgid history into skillful theater and tired slogans into existential epigrams. This film, adapted freely from the drama, presents even more impressive credentials. It is directed by Vittorio De Sica. It stars, along with Fredric March and Robert Wagner, two 1961 Oscar winners: Sophia Loren and Maximilian Schell. And it is written by Abby Mann, who also carried off a 1961 Oscar for his script of Judgment at Nuremberg. But there will hardly be any such laurels for Altona. It is a ponderous, pretentious, interminable Germanic muddle of a movie, one of the year’s noisier bombs.

What went wrong? The script. Scenarist Mann is a competent carpenter, and he has no trouble assembling the big blocks of Sartre’s story. At war’s end the sensitive son (Schell) of a German shipping magnate (March) shuts himself up in his father’s attic and for 15 years pretends that his country lies in permanent ruins. To his crazy way of thinking, if defeat had not really meant destruction for his country, how then could he justify the killing he had done, the crimes he had committed to assure his country’s survival?

The point is perhaps too fine, but Sartre presses it with French finesse. The film, to put it kindly, is less subtle. Scenarist Mann is a self-righteous and didactic young fellow who seems to feel that he has been personally appointed by Providence to sit in judgment on 80 million Germans. In Altona as in Nuremberg, his script is angry, preachy, shrill. It not only talks down. It is filled with the sort of teacher-knows-best truism (“It is better to face the truth no matter what the cost”) that for reply invites a spitball.

In this Elbe of verbiage Director De Sica sinks without a bubble. In scene after scene he simply aims his camera at a famous face and hopes for the best. He seldom gets it. Loren looks stupid in a stupid part. Schell, in a role demanding virility and violence, behaves like a hysterical girl. March, for want of anything better to play, plays March. Wagner at least gives the customers something to snicker at. His sunny California accent sounds gloriously silly in foggy old Hamburg, and when he walks in to take over the family firm, he looks wildly out of place. It’s as if Prince Valiant had come barging, bright-eyed and brainless, into the big board room at General Motors.