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| Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious | |
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| Directed by | Gottfried Reinhardt |
| Written by | Robert Shaw (novel) Jan Lustig Silvia Reinhardt |
| Produced by | Gottfried Reinhardt |
| Starring | Alec Guinness Mike Connors Robert Redford Paul Dahlke |
| Cinematography | Kurt Hasse |
| Edited by | Walter Boos |
| Music by | Harold Byrne Leon Carr |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious is a 1965 oddball comedy film shot in black and white directed by Gottfried Reinhardt and starring Alec Guinness, Mike Connors and Robert Redford. It is based on the 1960 novel The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw.
The title is a derived from Viennese Alfred Polgar's[1] quip, "The situation is desperate but not serious."[2]
- ^ Carr, Gilbert (August 20, 2019). "'Hopeless but not serious'". The Irish Times. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
As documented by the Viennese Kraus Archive, it was another Viennese writer, Alfred Polgar, who was the first to coin the phrase, inverting the commonplace 'the situation is serious but not hopeless'
- ^ Derbyshire, John (April 2, 2012). "Desperate But Not Serious". The Straggler (National Review). 112. johnderbyshire.com. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious....The point of the quip is to show the different outlooks of Prussians and Austrians: the first soldiering on to the end in dogged hope, the second in fatalistic acknowledgment that while the curtain may indeed be about to fall, there is no point forgoing life's normal pleasures in the interim.