One of Kurt (Curtis) Bernhardt's last films in Germany, and one of Germany's first talkies, Die Letzte Kompanie is set in 1806 during the Napoleonic wars. The plot extols the heroism of a small company of 12 men who defend a mill in order to protect their retreating comrades. The film was criticized at the time for glossing over “the contradiction between enraptured submission to a leader/cause and the human horror of the results of war”; German film historian Herbert Holba has attributed the film's glorification of endurance (“A command is a command...and...heroic death is the only way for a man to prove his love for the fatherland”) to the politics of Ufa's chairman. Ironically the film is a work of several men who left their “fatherland,” either voluntarily or by force: director Bernhardt, co-writer Hermann Kosterlitz (Henry Koster), cinematographer Guenther Krampf and actor Conrad Veidt. Bernhardt was arrested briefly by the Gestapo before he escaped to France and England and finally to the U.S., where he made “women's pictures” for Warners with a highly psychological and atmospheric bent (see Saturday, September 22).