Year: 1955 Country: West Germany, Austria Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst Cast: Albin Skoda, Oskar Werner, Lotte Tobisch, Willy Krause IMDB: Link Language : German Subtitles : English The mediocrity of Pabst's postwar work might be explained by the low quality of German film production in general, but, in fact, his excursions to America and Italy were evasive diversions from a subject he had been preoccupied with since the end of the war: a film about Hitler. Hitler had already been impersonated in many dramatic films by such actors as Ludwig Donath (The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler, 1943), Robert Watson (The Hitler Gang, 1944), Luther Adler {The Magic Face, 1951), and in satiric style by Chaplin in The Great Dictator. In German film, however, a trend was formulated—exemplified by Alfred Weidemann's popular Admiral Canaris—that camouflaged guilt complexes by accusing Hitler of everything and trying to prove that all Germans were not Nazi. Pabst was determined that his image would be unsparing in its truthfulness and that it would capture the atmosphere of collective paranoia that found its central focus in the dementia of the Fiihrer himself whose insidious thinking spawned a nationalist conspiracy. He ultimately found a treatment that appealed to him in Erich Maria Remarque's scenario, taken from the journal of Michael A. Musmano of the International Tribunal at Nuremberg, Ten Days to Die. The final script, written by Fritz Habeck, remains close to documentation with only a few additions for dramatic purposes. Pabst proceeded to cast the film with extreme care, choosing actors who not only closely physically resembled their real counter parts but who were also skilled actors. Hitler's bunker was copletely reconstructed according to its original size and layout on the sound stage. Pabst was determined to realign himself, aesthetically, with his former "realist" tendencies, with an unadorned vision of a claustrophobic environment. Known in Britain as Ten Days to Die and in the U.S. The Last Ten Days, Der Letzte Akt unravels the events that reportedly occured in and around the Chancellery in Berlin during the last days of the Fiihrer's reign of terror. For the most part, Pabst remains in this closely guarded arena, studying the deterioration of Hitler, psychologically and physically, as a metaphor for the impending collapse of an entire nation. The most significant concession to ficttion is the figure of Wurst, a young captain, splendidly portrayed by Oskar Werner, who gradually comes to represent the spirit of humanistic conscience tragically caught in a web of insanity. Functioning as a chorus of one, he is the first and last person to appear on screen. Initially, he is carrying out orders to accompany an officer on a special mission. When the officer is killed, he hopes to take his place and reports to the Fiihrer himself but his request is consitently turned down. Unaware that Wurst has arrived with news from the Eastern front. Hitler contin