Morituri - 1965 - Bernhard Wicki

This film received luke-warm reviews in 1965 but it works. Yul Brenner plays a German captain who is blackmailed by the Nazis into taking a dangerous mission: he is to transport 7,000 tons of rubber to a secret location. Marlon Brando plays a German pacifist who is blackmailed by the English to use his engineering skills to infiltrate the ship as a fake SS official in order to defuse bombs that could blow up the ship and the rubber if the Allies can isolate and capture the ship (which they intend to do).

The film is about coercion, whether it be from government agents or one's own sense of morality. The sense of moral coercion both characters tend to feel toward the end of the film mirrors, to a great extent, the external coercion they initially faced. Both characters resist their assignments but exercise their own forms of moral agency at different times during this story but are never satisfied with their decisions. Neither wants to be a part of an ugly war, neither wants to do ugly things, but both are compelled to act against their natures due to the horrors of Nazism and the consequences of not taking action against those horrors.

Funny thing - Brando affects a German accent in this film. Why not Yul Brenner? Why not Wally Cox? In fact, Brando is the only person in the film with a German accent but most of the characters represent Germans. Shouldn't the director have said, "Hey, Marlon, look....nice accent but...I mean, seriously...you need to drop it."?

See the film here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2BGHatqGTw