Duped Till Doomsday

1957 film

  • 7 March 1957 (1957-03-07)
Running time
97 minutesCountryEast GermanyLanguageGerman

Duped Till Doomsday (German: Betrogen bis zum jüngsten Tag) is a 1957 East German drama film directed by Kurt Jung-Alsen. It was entered into the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.[1]

Plot

Soldiers Wagner, Paulun and Lick are three friends and the best sharpshooters in a division stationed in Latvia, near the German-Soviet border. During June 1941, while on leave, they take a walk near a river and spot movement in a bush. Believing it to be a bird, they shoot in its direction, only to discover that they have killed Angelika, their captain's daughter. The three dump her corpse in a swamp and proceed as if nothing happened.

Lick relates the incident to his father, a Waffen-SS general, who decides to use the corpse for propaganda purposes: on 22 June, the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, he exhumes Angelika's remains and claims she was killed by Soviet marauders. Her father orders to shoot a number of Latvian women in retaliation.

Paulun tries to tell the truth, but Lick claims he is insane; Wagner remains silent. When Paulun tries to escape arrest, he is killed by Lick. Wagner does nothing and continues to behave as usual.

Cast

  • Rudolf Ulrich as Wagner
  • Wolfgang Kieling as Lick
  • Hans-Joachim Martens as Paulun
  • Walther Süssenguth as captain
  • Renate Küster as Angelika
  • Peter Kiwitt as Waffen-SS General Lick
  • Hermann Dieckhoff as division commander
  • Kurt Ulrich as lieutenant
  • Erich Brauer as staff sergeant
  • Hannes Fischer as kitchen sergeant
  • Wolfgang Lippert as Voss
  • Helga Raumer as innkeeper's daughter
  • Fritz Diez as Adolf Hitler (voice)
  • Horst Giese as uncredited role

Production

The script was adapted from the 1955-published novel Kameraden by Franz Fühmann. Fühmann himself was excluded from participating in the production.[2] The picture was the first of the "army epics", a new East German genre that reformed the classic German style of portraying military comradeship, replacing the typical tales of military friendship with plots centered on moral dilemmas facing the servicemen.[3] In addition, the picture was intended as a response to the war films produced in the West at those years.[4]

Reception

Betrogen bis zum jüngsten Tag was the first East German film to be entered into the Cannes Film Festival; a year earlier, at 1956, Zar und Zimmermann and Der Teufelskreis were screened outside the competition.[5] Although the picture had no chance of winning due to political considerations,[2] it was nominated for the Palme d'Or.[1]

The film was DEFA's most successful project since the 1946 Murderers Among Us. It was well received abroad.[2] The Punch magazine's reviewer wrote that it was "very worth seeing... mostly admirable, flowed in the end."[6] The East German media called it "the first DEFA war film" and praised it.[4] Fühmann's work received considerable attention due to the film, and his books were re-printed.[2]

References

  1. ^ a b "Festival de Cannes: Duped Till Doomsday". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 7 February 2009.
  2. ^ a b c d Dennis Tate. Franz Fühmann, innovation and authenticity: a study of his prose-writing. ISBN 978-90-5183-805-3. page 50.
  3. ^ Miera Liehm, Antonin J. Liehm . The Most Important Art: Soviet and Eastern European Film After 1945. ISBN 0-520-04128-3. Page 269.
  4. ^ a b Detlef Kannapin. Dialektik der Bilder. ISBN 978-3-320-02903-6. Page 150.
  5. ^ Ulrich Pfeil. Die "anderen" deutsch-französischen Beziehungen: die DDR und Frankreich 1949. ISBN 978-3-412-04403-9. Page 324.
  6. ^ Punch, Volume 234. Page 163.
  • Duped Till Doomsday at IMDb
  • Betrogen bis zum jüngsten Tag on PROGRESS' website.