Ten Seconds to Hell

Continuing through the backlog of movies I've got on my DVR, over the weekend I watched Ten Seconds to Hell, which aired on TCM as part of a night of Jack Palance movies.

Set in Berlin just after World War II (and filmed on location), the story tells of six Germans returning home from the war to the occupied British sector of Berlin. All six had been put into bomb disposal units because they had had indiscretions in their lives which weren't enough to send them to concentration camps, but enough that the Nazis were willing to let them all die. Erich Koertner (Jack Palance) and Karl Wirtz (Jeff Chandler) are more or less the two leaders of the group, at least under a British commander.

Bomb disposal is difficult work, and all of the men worry that they're going to die, so they set up something similar to a tontine in that they put part of their salaries into a pot, with that pot to be distributed either to the last survivor or however many of them are left at the end of three months. And sure enough, at least one of them is going to die, starting with young Globke. Apparently they're facing a sort of British bomb unknown to them with a double fuse, and they (and their British commander) would like to get information from the Brits on the working of that bomb so they can safely dispose of them and not put the public at any greater risk.

Against the backdrop of all of this, Erich and Karl become boarders in a rooming house run by French woman Margot (Martine Carol). She's not part of the occupation; instead, she made the mistake of marrying a German man who was killed in the war, and with the war over and the Germans having been defeated, she knows people back in France are going to see her as having betrayed their country, so it's off to Berlin where she won't have to face that. What she will have to face is Erich and Karl both developing feelings for her. But that leads to a conflict that might threaten both of their lives when disposing of those pesky bombs.

Ten Seconds to Hell is a movie that has an interesting premise, since bomb disposal isn't seen all that often in the movies (Michael Powell's The Small Back Room as well as Juggernaut come to mind). But this one never really rises above the pedestrian, with a formulaic plot about conflict between the two man men both professionally and with a woman. And it doesn't seem like there's all that much variation from one bomb disposal to the next. They kind of run together and make the movie drag a bit.

Still, Ten Seconds to Hell is available on DVD, so you can judge for yourself.