Eva Katharina Schultz

The author Peter Ustinov has called his work "Endspurt" a "biographical adventure". Biographical because the somewhat ambitious but later successful writer Sam Kinsale meets here as a twenty-, forty- and sixty-year-old. The interesting thing about this film, however, is that the four Sams are confronted with each other. The diversity of an eighty-year-old life becomes transparent. At the age of 20, Sam Kinsale loves the young Stella and is determined to marry her. But 20 years later, he is fed up with the marriage and wants to leave her. But he doesn't because she is expecting a child. As a sixty-year-old, he is constantly making compromises both in his work as a writer and in his personal life.

This film deals with the contrasts of the Wilhelminian era in Berlin: the splendor of the monarchy, the economic and intellectual vitality of the up-and-coming imperial capital on the one hand, and the misery of the proletarians in the tenements on the other. The documentary sets depressing images of the horrors at the front against the exhilaration of victory at the beginning of the First World War.

March, 1945: The insecure and hesitant reserve lieutenant Felix Bleck receives orders to lead a transport of 40 prisoners to the Western Front, where the men are to be burned up in a punishment battalion. On the way there, Bleck realizes the inhuman futility of his assignment and makes a fateful decision.