Like so many international co-productions HenriVerneuil's "The 25th Hour" is epic in scale but feeble in execution. A potentially good story about how Anthony Quinn's Romanian peasant finds himself, through some incredibly far-fetched circumstances, in the S.S. after the German invasion, falls very flat as its plot of almost Dickensian complexity gets lost on the widescreen and its cast of many nations struggles to put across its deeply mediocre script, (perhaps three script writers, including Britains Wolf Mankowitz, was two too many). Quinn himself is totally miscast but then so is everyone else. It has the feel of a poor man's "Dr Zhivago", (the film, not the book), so maybe what it really needed was a David Lean to carry it off. As it stands it is something of a disaster that thankfully isn't much seen today.
Review of The 25th Hour
