The Condemned of Altona

Vittorio De Sica's adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1959 play The Condemned of Altona, scripted by Abby Mann and Cesare Zavattini. A German family in Hamburg made rich by shipbuilding. The dying patriarch summons his younger son and daughter-in-law to discuss the firm's future. But in one wing of the house is the elder son, Franz: shut in a room since the war, convinced Germany is still in ruins, and never allowed to see outside. What the family is hiding is not a man but a crime. Sartre's play was about a class refusing to reckon with its Nazi past; De Sica keeps that and adds an Italian angle of his own. Sophia Loren plays the daughter-in-law, Maximilian Schell is Franz, Fredric March the father and Robert Wagner the younger son. Who it is for: viewers who like text-driven, stage-derived drama about moral responsibility. Who it is not for: anyone wanting cinematic flow. The film never quite loses the smell of the stage, it leans on long speeches, and critics were divided on exactly that then and remain so now.