Ten Seconds to Hell
With Jeff Chandler, Jack Palance, Martine Carol.
US, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 93 min.
Print source: Park Circus
National guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder take literal form as dormant bombs strewn across the wreckage of postwar Berlin in Ten Seconds to Hell, Aldrich’s most cerebral war picture (albeit an unfairly studio-mutilated one). Jack Palance leads a team of Nazi dissenters recruited by the Allies to defuse and dispose of lingering nukes as part of Germany’s push toward rehabilitation, a gig that practically guarantees existential dread as a vocational regularity. The task grows thornier when a scoundrel within the group (Jeff Chandler) talks his colleagues into a last-man-standing wager, an endeavor ostensibly designed to further stress the severity of the job but which actually just enables the kind of intricate group friction at which Aldrich excelled. Rationalist, collectivist ethics battle reckless ego and stubbornness in Aldrich and Teddi Sherman’s innuendo-dense screenplay, which also maps the growing rift between head and heart in a romance subplot bearing shades of Journey to Italy. Most noteworthy, however, are the tensely protracted bomb deactivation sequences, which play out in nail-biting silence and splinter the treacherous process into suspense-building chains of discrete visual details.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Four Star Playhouse: The Squeeze, The Witness and The Hard Way
The Southerner
