"Der letzte Akt", also known as "The Last Act", and there are many more titles under which this film can be found, is a West German / Austrian co-production that resulted in a German-language black-and-white film from 1955. The director is Georg Wilhelm Pabst, one of Germany's most known silent film directors, and here we have one of his rare German-language sound films. The year is 1955, so this one had its 60th anniversary last year. The most famous cast member is probably Oscar nominee Oskar Werner and Albin Skoda plays Adolf Hitler. This also shows you what the movie is about. It should not be a surprise to anybody as so so many German(-language) films in the 1950s dealt with coming to terms with what happened in the country one decade earlier. And one decade is very accurate in this case as the film is about the finals days of Hitler's live. It was obvious the war was lost and Hitler came to terms with his own fate and decided to take his own life with everything crumbling around him. In general, this is a historic context that I am fairly interested in, but I still must say the film did very little for me and it dragged on several occasions. Maybe the novel-based script simply wasn't good enough for a runtime over 90 minutes. That's also why I cannot say I enjoyed the watch very much and give it a thumbs down. I recommend you to watch something else instead unless you really really care for the subject.
Review of The Last Ten Days
