The 25th Hour (film)

The 25th Hour
(La Vingt-cinquième Heure)
The 25th Hour; (La Vingt-cinquième Heure)
	film poster by Howard Terpning
Directed by	Henri Verneuil
Written by	François Boyeur; Wolf Mankowitz; Henri Verneuil
Produced by	Carlo Ponti
Starring	Anthony Quinn; Virna Lisi
Cinematography	Andreas Winding
Music by	Georges Delerue
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release dates	16 February 1967 (US); 26 April 1967 (France);
Running time	196 minutes (Europe)
Countries	France; Italy; Yugoslavia
Languages	French; English ; Romanian

The 25th Hour (French: La Vingt-cinquième Heure) is a 1967 anti-war drama film, starring Anthony Quinn and Virna Lisi. It was produced by Italian producer Carlo Ponti and directed by French director Henri Verneuil. The film is based on a novel by C. Virgil Gheorghiu. It follows the troubles experienced by a Romanian peasant couple caught up in World War II.

Plot

In a small village in Romania, a local police constable frames Johann Moritz (Quinn) on charges of being Jewish, because Moritz' wife, Suzanna, has refused his advances. Moritz is sent to a Romanian concentration camp as a Jew, Jacob Moritz. He escapes to Hungary with some Jewish prisoners where the Hungarians imprison them for being citizens of an enemy country (Romania). The Hungarians eventually send them to Germany to fill German "requests" for foreign labourers. In Germany Moritz is spotted by an SS officer who designates him as Aryan, frees him from the labor camp and forces him to join Waffen SS. After the war, Moritz is brutally beaten by Russians for being in the Waffen-SS and then arrested and prosecuted as a Waffen-SS war criminal by the Americans. Eventually he is released and re-united with his wife and sons in Germany.

The picture is based on the novel of the same name by Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu. The story line includes Hungary's alliance with Nazi Germany, the forced cession of Eastern Romania to the Soviet Union in 1940 and subsequent events in Central Europe during and after the Second World War.

Cast

Anthony Quinn as Johann Moritz
Virna Lisi as Suzanna Moritz
Grégoire Aslan as Dobresco
Michael Redgrave as Defence lawyer
Marcel Dalio as Strul (as Dalio)
Jan Werich as Sgt. Constantin
Harold Goldblatt as Isaac Nagy
Alexander Knox as Prosecutor
Liam Redmond as Father Koruga
Meier Tzelniker as Abramovici
Kenneth J. Warren as Insp. Varga
John Le Mesurier as Tribunal president
Serge Reggiani as Trajan Koruga

External links

The 25th Hour at IMDb
The 25th Hour at the TCM Movie Database
La Vingt-Cinquième Heure at AllMovie

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