The 25th Hour

In Romania in 1939 a gendarme who wants a peasant's wife denounces the man as a Jew. Johann Moritz is not Jewish. He is sent to a labour camp, escapes, crosses into Hungary, is taken for a spy and handed to Germany. There an officer measures him and declares him a perfect Aryan specimen; he is put into an SS uniform. When the war ends the Americans arrest him as a war criminal. The subject is not the war but identity having nothing to do with the person carrying it. Across eight years Moritz is declared somebody else by every new authority and has no say in any of it. The film's merciless humour comes from that. The form is broad and episodic. The narrative moves country by country and the same structure repeats at every stop; the repetition is deliberate. The source is Virgil Gheorghiu's novel, which had a wide response in Europe on publication; the idea that bureaucracy could destroy a person through a clerical error was a direct criticism aimed at the post-war order. Anthony Quinn plays Moritz and Virna Lisi his wife. Henri Verneuil directs. Who it is for: viewers who like post-war European drama and criticism of bureaucracy. Who it is not for: anyone expecting realism; the narrative is deliberately exaggerated and the character remains the carrier of an idea.