FULL CIRCLE, 1973

 

Writer: Erich Maria Remarque
Dir. and Prod.: Otto Preminger

Anna: Bibi Andersson
Rohde: Leonard Nimoy
Grete: Linda Carlson
Katz: James Tolkan

Berlin 1945.
The night before Adolf Hitler's suicide the Red Army approaches Berlin and war is shaking the city. In the top floor of a Berlin flat a woman, Anna, is lying on her bed. From her flat the rubble on the street and the ruins can be seen. Anna's husband was a shopkeeper whom the Nazis have killed 2 years ago because he has helped Jews to escape from the Gestapo. Still people like Grete come in or call in for help in these times. 

An university professor named Katz knows Rohde and must identify him for the Nazis in order to spare his own life - if the Nazis keep their promise. But Katz cannot live with the thought of betraying a friend and kills himself without giving away the information. Having escaped from a concentration camp, Rohde seeks a place to hide from the Gestapo and finds it in Anna's flat. She reluctantly agrees to hide him for a night and gets him a uniform so that he can pose as a Nazi, Schmidt. And she pretends to be his friend with whom he has spent a night in bed. 

Realizing that the war is at its end and being lost, Schmidt, the true Nazi, now poses as a Jew and tries to fool the Russians into believing that Rohde was a Nazi. Though the Russians do not go for this, catch Schmidt in contradicting himself and finally shoot him, Rhode can convince them that he his not the Nazi he looks, but a Jew who was hiding from the Gestapo. But he is not better of in their hands as he was before under the Nazis.