The Verdict

Directed by Jean Valère

WW2 is coming to an end. On the seaside, resistant fighters are captured and imprisoned in a basement. Within an hour, all of them will be shot—an hour of fear, of impossible dreams, of false hopes. Based on a Bernanos play, it sometimes recalls, by the subject of sacrifice (a sacrifice of an average human being is not an average one), "Dialogue des Carmélites," in which nuns, during the French Revolution, were guillotined because they would have betrayed their faith if they had accepted the new rules.