After a score of short subjects and two crime-busting programmers, Fred Zinnemann got unexpectedly boosted to this A-list project by M-G-M producer Pandro S. Berman (with star Spencer Tracy seconding). A strong pre-war suspenser (1936 Germany), it opens as seven prisoners escape from a Concentration Camp, only to be quickly hunted down, returned to hang on Seven Crosses. Only Tracy’s cross, the seventh, remains waiting, largely because he has friends in a nearby town. But who to trust? How to connect? What of the danger he’s putting them in? Some of the conventions of studio lot filmmaking, especially under wartime restrictions with repurposed sets, accentuate a canned quality. Still, much holds up remarkably well. The opening a stunner, with a strong UFA/German expressionist feel to it. F.W. Murnau cameraman Karl Freund capturing misty fog & marshlands of the escape as if just off THE LAST LAUGH/’24.* (An artistic atmosphere Zinnemann can’t maintain in town scenes.) Structured as a series of dangerous encounters for Tracy as he tries to contact the local resistance network to help get him out of the country (does it even exist?), there really are no dead spots; though scripter Helen Deutsch’s use of a deceased escapee as narrator isn’t her best idea. But a lot of good actors in here, with Hume Cronyn, as an ambiguous ‘Good German’ pal, and debuting Jessica Tandy as his sympathetic wife, particularly fine. Plenty of honest suspense, even if composer Roy Webb (presumably on loan from R.K.O.) needlessly juices up the melodrama. And Tracy is very much at his best, looking haggard & haunted, especially in the opening, his underplaying rarely more affecting. And so it continues, right up to a surprisingly unforced, clear-eyed ending.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *But was it Karl Freund? Zinnemann, no fan of Freund’s officious manner, made quick use of the far more congenial Robert Surtees in the three weeks Freund was out sick.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Zinnemann’s own thoughts: ‘The picture was not as good as it should have been. But it was nothing to be ashamed of and in due course it led to THE SEARCH.’ A good thing to lead to! A still underseen, underappreciated 1948 beauty, helped by location shooting in post-war Berlin and the fresh, open-faced appeal of debuting Montgomery Clift. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-search-1948.html
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