Ten Seconds to Hell (1959)

6 German soldiers join in the efforts to defuse and dispose of unexploded bombs that litter Berlin after World War II. While they're able to maintain a confident front when stumping for better pay - on the basis of being experts - they all quickly agree to a deal where each man puts half his pay into a fund, and whoever is still alive after 3 months gets that money.

Besides the tension of wondering when each man while be called out to deal with the 1,000 pound British bombs they can't figure out how to disarm successfully, the conflict is between Eric Koertner (Jack Palance) and Karl Wirtz (Jeff Chandler). Koertner is the de facto leader of the group, while Wirtz is the one who suggests the bet in the first place. He's focused on winning, and his approach is to risk high stakes for big rewards. He goes out on the town, returning in nice coats with bottles of champagne, and tries unsuccessfully to woo the woman who owns the house they stay in.

Koertner is all nerves. It's that guy on the edge Palance played so often, but in this case, he's on the edge of falling to pieces rather than going ballistic. It feels like we never see him in anything other than his work clothes. He comes home and collapses into his bed. The housefrau clearly prefers him to Wirtz, who she tries to politely deflect until that doesn't work, but Koertner is too broken by the continued losses of his friends, by the knowledge his turn is lurking out there, everything. Even if he survives this bet, he can't see himself having any sort of a life. The strain has broken him, and he's almost holding on just to try and deny Wirtz his "win."

So it's a tense, personal film about how men try to cope with going out every day and facing death when other people are trying to move on. The British major they work for remarks, when explaining why he can't get any info about the fuse on those British bombs says, like most countries, England wanted to forget about the war the moment it ended. But it lingers, it still reaches out and claims lives, in more ways than one.

The movie does make a mistake with its unseen narrator at the beginning and end of the film. It feels like a way to not waste time introducing the characters, relegating that to panning from one to another while telling us things like that Tillig, 'only wished to laugh again.' But the narrator doesn't put any emotion into it, so it sounds like a telephone operator just reading off facts. It's an approach better suited to a documentary about bomb disposal than a movie about men crumbling under sustained pressure.