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One year before Nuremberg and with the war still raging, the "unspeakable miseries" of the Nazi regime on trial. (Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw is also bracingly adumbrated.) Prosecution of the kommandant (Alexander Knox), three witnesses in a vast courtroom, a Polish village from 1919 to the present. From doves under the dormant bell the camera tilts down the tower and pans across the town square, a movement later repeated to survey the same terrain in ruins, overrun by trucks and military marches. "The future lies in victory, not freedom," says the German professor limping back from the battlefield, so petrified by hatred as to have become a stranger to his fiancée (Marsha Hunt). His sneer in the classroom modulates into a subtle leer as his gaze falls on a pigtailed student (Whale's Frankenstein is brought to bear on her fate), in Germany he bunks with his brother (Erik Rolf) and learns of "this Hitler creature." A miniature of fear and outrage by André De Toth, as barbed a European view as Lang's (Hangmen Also Die!) or Sirk's (Hitler's Madman). Calls for peace from the local priest (Henry Travers) can't halt the hurled stone that takes out the villain's eye, the aria of insurrection from the rabbi (Richard Hale) at the railroad round-up is met with machine-gun fire. A striking effect has Knox and Hunt in front of an upper-story window that becomes a geometric screen with distant figures like moving dots, a frontal close-up suits the confrontational finale. "Remember this! Always remember this!" Fuller faces the Jungvolk in Verboten! With Richard Crane, Dorothy Morris, Ruth Nelson, Kurt Kreuger, and Shirley Mills. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |