AllMovie

A gripping, evocative wartime story set in Germany with anti-Nazi sentiments, this compelling drama is based on an actual incident. Everything starts when the skeleton of a long-dead soldier is found at a local fair. Flashbacks reveal that the skeleton is that of a young man who deserted the German army while it was retreating in the losing months of the war. The deserter (Gotz George) is sheltered by a priest and also by a young French woman (Juliette Mayniel) who was not beyond sleeping with the occasional German soldier. But unlike these past instances, the woman and AWOL soldier fall in love. The village sympathetic to anti-Nazi forces, the cruelty of the local Nazi commander and the Gestapo, and the suffering of the deserter's family are all precisely and movingly etched.