Alec Guinness is Adolf Hitler trapped in his bunker while Berlin burns 60 feet above him.
This biographical film claims to be a completely factual account of the Fuehrer’s final week-and-a-half underground: his 56th birthday party, the last hurrahs, the hurried marriage to Eva Braun (played by German actress Doris Kunstmann) and suicide.
Hitler’s health is shattered – the result of his narrow escape from assassination by members of his own general staff; his mind is in chaos – a combination of despair and a thoroughly justifiable paranoia, and in his more lucid moments he knows that the war is lost.
It’s a brave, incredibly detailed performance from Guinness (who looks convincingly like Hitler here), but the film’s Italian writer/director Ennio De Concini conspires against him, cutting to sepia-tinted newsreel footage which is structurally and dramatically pointless.
He also unwisely adds hindsight in Simon Ward’s idealistic young Hauptmann Hoffman, who not only invades the bunker armed with battalions of postwar guilt but also plants political doubts in the mind of Eva Braun.
Through Hoffman’s eyes, we see the two kinds of people upon whose shoulders Hitler rode to power: the fanatics who shared his fantasies and the opportunists who shared his lust for power. A sprinkling of both groups now waits listlessly, committed to sharing his fate and the “Viking funeral” he announces for Germany.
Adolf Hitler
Alec Guinness Hauptmann Hoffmann
Simon Ward General Krebs
Adolfo Celi Hanna Reitsch
Diane Cilento Field Marshal Keitel
Gabriele Ferzetti General Von Greim
Eric Porter Eva Braun
Doris Kunstmann General Burgdorf
Joss Ackland Dr Stumpfegger
John Barron Josef Goebbels
John Bennett Frau Christian
Sheila Gish Fegelein
Julian Glover General Weidling
Michael Goodliffe Martin Bormann
Mark Kingston Trude
Angela Pleasence Walter Wagner
Andrew Sachs Professor Gebhardt
Timothy West Boldt
Kenneth Colley Hanske
Philip Locke
