The Young Lions is a 1958 American epic World War II drama film directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin.

German ski instructor Christian Diestl is hopeful that Adolf Hitler will bring new prosperity and social mobility to Germany, so when war breaks out he joins the army, becoming a lieutenant.

Noah works as a junior department store clerk, and attends a party that Michael throws, where he meets Hope Plowman.

Christian discovers the reality of the Third Reich when he stumbles upon a concentration camp and hears the commander talk about the mass exterminations.

The mayor of a nearby town offers working parties of his constituents to "clean up" the camp before American reporters and photographers arrive.

Hope is at a window in their apartment and notices him coming, and lifts up their baby daughter for him to finally see, and he ascends the stairs quickly to embrace his family.

The film became a box office success and was the key to Martin's comeback in the wake of his split with partner Jerry Lewis.

[4] Martin, after the failure of his previous movie, accepted $20,000 to star, which was less than he made in a single week of nightclub appearances at the time.

In the film version, the character of the German soldier Christian is portrayed more sympathetically as a decent man who is deceived, rather than seduced and corrupted, by his country's Nazi rulers.

Although the novel's character is increasingly hardened by his experiences and unrepentant to the end, in the film version he grows ever more disillusioned and renounces his cause in the final scenes.

As Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times in 1958 in a review of the film, the screen version is "prettier" than the novel and in the former, there is "no noticeable moral difference between the one German and two Americans".

[7] Shaw himself is said to have disliked the changes to his novel in the film version, in particular Brando's sympathetic portrayal of Christian and the playing down of the anti-Semitism that Noah encounters in the original book.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, however, gave the film an unfavorable review, calling Marlon Brando's German accent reminiscent of the old vaudeville comedy team Weber and Fields; Montgomery Clift's performance "lackluster"; and the movie as a whole "a formless mosaic".

[10] Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote, Under Edward Dmytryk's direction the film weaves, moderately skillfully, the stories of the two Americans and the German until their paths cross outside a concentration camp at the war's end.

The film's basic flaw is in the assumption that by combining three stories that would otherwise be commonplace, you will produce an epic; and the finish crowns its superficiality with pointlessness.