Die schmutzigen Hände

I saw this movie several years so my memory of it is a bit vague, but I remember being quite pleasantly surprised. I had figured that any movie written by Jean Paul Sartre would be about mildly depressed people sitting around making `existential' comments, but that's not the case in the three movies that I've seen by him (this one, The Chips Are Down, and The Proud Ones). His movies are fast-paced and, unlike modern American movies, unpredictable.

Dirty Hands is about a man who is part of a movement, clearly based on communism, who is recruited by his leaders to assassinate his former professor. He is conflicted about whether he should or not, since he has great respect and love for the man and yet is loyal to the cause.

I don't know that much about Sartre, but I do know that he was involved with the communists during and after World War II. I was struck by how anticommunist this movie is, not in a Joe McCarthy sense but in the way that former communists, such as Arthur Koestler and Wilhelm Reich, became disgusted with the tactics of the movement.