The Ninth Day
This German film has been hailed as excellent in some quarters for its direct handling of a moral dilemma. The situation is that of a Catholic priest freed from Dachau for 9 days in order to convince the Luxembourg church hierarchy to sign a document supporting the Nazi regime. If he manages it, he and his comrades in the concentration camp go free, if he doesn’t its back to Dachau and possible harm to his family and the church. It makes for a good story and plenty of built in suspense, but I can`t say I was gripped by this film by Volker Schlondorff. The best parts are the dialogues between priest and Nazi officer and the latter’s arguments to justify the extermination of the Jews and other minorities. The rest is many long looks from the unusual skull-like face of Ulrich Mattes and plenty of hand wringing. It is a neatly-made movie and all credit to another film tackling these topics but I preferred Costa Gavras’s “Amen” which was a bit more melodramatic and other works planting similar situations in different contexts.
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