A Shot at Dawn Review: Sweat, Fog, and Peter Lorre Stealing the Show

If you have a soft spot for early 1930s German talkies where everyone wears heavy wool coats and looks slightly damp, A Shot at Dawn is absolutely your jam.

But if you need snappy modern pacing or can't stand hiss-heavy audio tracks, you should probably steer clear.

It's a shame because this little Weimar crime thriller has some real grit to it. 🎬

The plot is pretty simple on paper. A Berlin cop goes undercover to infiltrate a gang of diamond thieves hiding out on the foggy outskirts of the city.

Karl Ludwig Diehl plays the lead cop, and he's... fine. He has that very stiff, hands-on-hips posture that actors in 1932 seemed to love.

The real reason to watch this is the bad guys, especially a very young, very sweaty Peter Lorre.

He doesn't even have that many lines, but his eyes do some heavy lifting here. 👀

There is this one scene in a dingy tavern where he just stares at a glass of beer like he's trying to hypnotize it.

It reminded me of the intense, silent-era lingering you get in something like The Kiss, but with way more dirt under the fingernails.

The atmosphere is the real winner here. You can practically smell the wet coal and cheap tobacco through the screen.

The director loves those long, wide shots of muddy fields where characters look like tiny ants crawling across a gray canvas.

Sometimes the audio cuts out slightly, or the actors stand too close to the microphone, making their voices boom weirdly.

It’s charmingly imperfect.

I noticed the editing gets really choppy during a chase scene near the end. It's almost like they ran out of film or the editor just got tired and went to lunch.

But honestly, that just makes it feel more real than the polished stuff we get now.

If you've seen some of the slapstick shorts from around this time, like Wrong Again, this is the exact opposite of that sunny, silly energy.

It’s dark, cynical, and a little bit sad.

A few things that cracked me up:

• The chief of police has a mustache that looks like it was glued on backwards.
• The way they hide the diamonds is so obvious a toddler could find them.
• One of the thieves wears a hat so big it constantly shadows his entire face.

So yeah, it’s not a masterpiece, but it’s got soul.

If you want to spend eighty minutes in a gloomy, black-and-white Berlin with some shady characters, give it a spin.