Munich - The Edge of War
Short description
In 1938, as Europe's leaders gather in Munich, two former Oxford friends find themselves on opposite sides. Hugh Legat works for the British government, while Paul von Hartman serves the German state. When Paul acquires documents revealing a secret Nazi agenda, he must reach Hugh and get the information into British hands. The two men, once close, now move cautiously through a city filled with diplomats, officials and surveillance, trying to decide how far they can trust each other and whether the truth can change the course of the negotiations.
Christian Schwochow directs this historical drama, his third feature after Open the Wall and The German Lesson and one of two films he made in 2021. Ben Power wrote the screenplay, and Andrew Eaton produced. George MacKay and Jannis Niewöhner lead the cast as Hugh and Paul, with Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain, Jessica Brown Findlay as Pamela Legat, August Diehl as Franz Sauer and Sandra Hüller as Helen Winter. The film runs 130 minutes and was made as a co-production between Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Released at the end of 2021, the film drew a solid but not overwhelming response. On IMDb it holds 6.8 from around 39,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.9 from a much smaller base of roughly 690. A critics' rating of 6.7 from 87 reviews places it close to the audience scores, suggesting broad agreement about its merits rather than a sharp divide between reviewers and viewers.
What's left behind the scenes
- Paul is warned that he should not smell of cigarette smoke if he is to have an audience with the Führer. This detail is based on a real fact – Hitler detested cigarette smoke and did not allow anyone to smoke in his presence.
- Actor George MacKay learned German for the role of Hugh Legat.
- Yannis Niewöhner and George MacKay play fictional characters, but screenwriter Robert Harris claims that their images contain traits of the real diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz (1909-1944) and a scientist named A.L. Rose (1903-1997). Rose was gay and felt platonic attraction to Trott. Trott, who was a less amiable man than Hartmann in the film, became involved in the conspiracy of Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg (1907-1944) against Hitler in 1944, but the conspiracy failed and Trott was executed.
- The document that Helen shows Paul at her home is the Hossbach Memorandum – a record of a meeting of the highest military and foreign policy leadership of Nazi Germany, in which Hitler outlined his expansionist plans. The document is named after the record-keeper and military adjutant to Hitler, Colonel Count Friedrich Hossbach (1894-1980). After the war began, the memorandum was reworked into the General Plan Ost – a plan of genocide and ethnic cleansing that envisioned the deportation of 31 million people to the east, to Siberia, where they would face systematic extermination through starvation and unbearable working conditions, so that the territories they left could be colonized by ethnic Germans.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
