Six Wehrmacht soldiers, relegated to defusing Allied bombs by their Nazi superiors, are now POWs returning to the rubble of occupied Berlin and must wage another war against rational egoism. Robert Aldrich’s superb direction allows the narrative to unwind and defuse like the dual detonator of a British thousand-pound bomb, while DP Ernest Laszlo’s wonderful compositions and deep focus photography, especially while shooting on location in post-WWII Berlin, add verisimilitude and tension to this taught melodrama.
The six-pack is led by demoted Architect and anti-Nazi Erik Koertner (Jack Palance), a man whose altruistic temperament reduced him to choose between bomb squad tech or concentration camp victim, who must battle against his SS cohort Karl Wirtz's (Jeff Chandler) inherent selfishness. They gamble their mortality in a tontine, a three-month annuity where they invest their wages (minus living expenses) and all goes to the survivor, winner take all. But the group of experts is confronted by a new, unknown British bomb with a dual detonator, and they soon become extinct, one by one. There is a minor love interest between Koertner and his landlady Margot Hofer (Martine Carol), a French woman who betrayed her country by falling in love with a German soldier who was killed in the Africa Corps during the war. Alone, she is repulsed by Wirtz’s mocking nihilism and drawn to Koertner’s kind humanism. But the film doesn’t explode this melodrama as it’s concerned with the battle between Nazi ideology and Western morality.
The bomb defusing scenes are full of the anxiety of flesh and sinew against rusting steel death, which is less than ten seconds away at any moment. The scenes are shot from low angle without music, so we only hear their sharp breath and the slow grinding of metal as the fuse spins ever so slowly. They wear no armor or padding, their only protection their skill and blind luck, which soon runs out. So, it comes to the final scene were Wirtz is stuck with an unexploded bomb with only a pencil stub keeping him from oblivion, while Koertner works to save both of them (damn the annuity, which he wants to pay to one of the squad’s widows anyway). But Wirtz has the opportunity to sabotage the effort and he does so, with only Koertner’s skill keep him balanced on the razor’s edge of existence. But Wirtz realizes this is his bomb to defuse and as Koertner walks away, Wirtz purposely blows himself to kingdom come.
Final Grade: (B+)
