Morituri (1965)

World War II, 1942. A German engineer living in India is blackmailed into assuming the identity of an SS officer and embarking on a German ship which is transporting rubber from Japan to France. The allies plan to intercept that ship and the engineer's mission is to prevent it from being scuttled by the ship's captain when that interception occurs.

This is a very tense film which adopts the point of view of an impostor. His efforts at not being unmasked and simultaneously accomplishing a difficult task are at the center of the movie. The situation in the ship is unstable even without his presence, and he must use that instability in his favor. There is a fascinating power play amongst the various persons in the ship that makes it a metonimic model of a larger community -- say, a nation. The film puts in evidence how a foreign entity -- in this case, the protagonist -- with a blending capability and a survival agenda may be dangerous to the existence and goals of a community. The author or authors seem to have taken into their hands a mission that is, in itself, just as challenging as that of the protagonist: to rebuke Adolf Hitler's considerations on the question "Is this a German?". They even have added a Jewish woman into the narrative, perhaps for illustrative purposes. The initial dialogue held in an Indian house is essential for the full understanding of the film: the protagonist has evaded war, loves "art" and considers himself a pacifist. As it turns out, he becomes an example of the famous saying by Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Of course, a fictional narrative is necessarily a partial view of any problem, but the effort is commendable anyway.

Rating: 60