I first saw this in 1970 as a teenager and have thought about it intermittently ever since then. Topol made it later on and so I remember him in this film rather than his other famous less meaty roles later on. He plays a Jewish fixer in a camp in Austria. There is friction with the Soviet forces which is protrayed well, but we are not told the allied powers have already agreed to send all the Displaced Persons back to their countries of origin pre 1939.
There are humourous incidents however the ending is foreshadowed for those who are aware of history - the betrayal of Yalta.
In the end the Russians DPs are going back to trial and then a life in the gulags.
Churchill later described a great wall ( from Stettin in the Baltic down to .....) and this has resonances in 2018. Niven's characters job is to get the job done according to the agreements already in place and then get back to England.
After this film, a neighbour commented - no one else knows that large numbers of Eastern Europeans were sent back against their will to their deaths in Russia, and I explained we had a large displaced population in our village and they talked about it alot.
I agreed with him that it was a very odd subject for a comedy and a lot of it I didnt find funny at all. Perhaps I was mistaking comedy for farce, and that it was a comedy in the sense that Chekhov wrote
Review of Before Winter Comes
