classicsoncall The theme of Man's inherent decency in the face of horrible and inhuman conditions permeates this story of an escaped concentration camp survivor, on the run from Westhofen Prison Camp in 1936. The world was still three years away from the hostilities of World War II, although the movie was made virtually in the middle of that War. It's interesting to note that the Hitler Nazi machine was already in full gear even at this point in history, with the existence of concentration camps and Hitler Youth proclaiming loyalty to the Fuhrer.What's chilling, and quite reminiscent of how the mass of humanity conducts their lives even in the present day, is how ambivalent people can be while tragedy and evil exist all around them. I don't think anyone would dispute that Paul Roeder (Hume Cronyn) was a good man, but his conversation with George Heisler (Spencer Tracy) about how he had prospered with Hitler in power was disturbingly revealing. The statement a fellow escaped prisoner Fuelgrabbe (Konstantin Shayne) makes to Heisler further illustrates the irony of their situation - "We're not criminals, yet nobody cares".Urged forward by the conscience inspired voice of fellow escapee Wallau (Roy Collins), Heisler wends his way across the German countryside until he finds people he can confide in and rely on to lead him to safety. He must convince himself to place his faith in the words of his friend Roeder - "The only thing I can trust now is a man's heart".

utgard14 Seven men escape from a concentration camp in pre-WW2 Nazi Germany. The Nazis place seven crosses in the courtyard of the camp, with orders that each captured escapee be put to death on them. One by one the men are captured, save one. That man (Spencer Tracy) must try and find help so he can escape the country, though his experiences have made him cynical that there are good people left in Germany.Fascinating film with a nice script, fine acting, and beautiful cinematography by the great Karl Freund. Interesting technique of having Ray Collins' character narrate the movie postmortem, years before the more famous Sunset Boulevard did it. Spencer Tracy gives a terrific performance even though his character really doesn't speak much, especially in the first hour. The supporting cast is excellent, with Hume Cronyn a standout. It's a little overlong but worth your time.

rpvanderlinden This film stars Spencer Tracy as a concentration camp escapee named George Heisler who navigates his way to freedom through the perils of Nazi Germany. Along the way he meets many people who help him, and his cynicism and fatigue fade away. Early in the story, soon after he's left the camp, he meets a little girl, and in his mind he's sure that he'll kill her if she attracts the wrong kind of attention to him. Next he lurches into the home of his ex-girlfriend, frightening her. And no wonder, because his face has a twisted expression on it that frightened ME - in this moment Tracy is almost unrecognizable. This man's an animal, he's been through hell and he has no reason to believe that the world is anything other than a sewer. For my money this is a pretty startling opening for a 1944 movie.Not to throw definitions around too freely, I'm tempted to describe this film as Nazi noir. Heisler weaves his way through German society of 1936, where it's the criminals who are in power, and scuttling through the streets are the folks who are merely trying to survive, in any way possible. At the back of our minds is the worrisome knowledge that things are going to get exponentially worse. Fred Zinnemann, the director, creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and palpable dread where the night is filled with dark shadows and any tiny act of resistance to the Nazi regime is a colossal act of courage. There is almost no violence in the film, yet the threat of violence hangs heavy in the air. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy play Paul and Liesel Roeder, a couple who are old friends of Heisler and who befriend him. Paul is politically neutral. He doesn't follow the news, and one gets the feeling that he would rather not know anything about what's going on. One of the fascinating threads in the film is his growing awareness. The scenes with Cronyn and Tandy are wonderful - real chemistry is bubbling here and they seem to belong together (and we all know what happened in real life). I must mention that George Macready and Agnes Moorehead are very good in small roles. There's considerable art and intelligence in "The Seventh Cross", and a preview of what was to come in Zinnemann's illustrious career.

carvalheiro "The Seventh Cross" (1944) directed by Fred Zinnemann is a free adaptation from a novel made eight years before about concentration camps in Germany, during the national socialism reign in 1936. It seems like a documentary now, as about a peaceful crowd that for instance observes a fugitive at the roofs as if it was an acrobatic meeting with a circus man, that takes the suicide as option or as concerning another who escapes and changes the suit in a local theater at town, just before enters in the net lace of friends under servitude.The sensation in which by night the main character of the tranquil fugitive is sight as an anodyne citizen inside the tramway and confounded for a while - it seems to him - with a pickpocket, it is of course the main impression of normality of the current life here, even though it is at the core of any society where common natural behavior it was the same, if it was not as there. There are in this movie an air of naturalism and even a visit to the headquarters of Gestapo in Berlin, as it was likewise a mere chance to the German people. To see Germany before its destruction by the war is one of the imaginative points of the Zinnemann conception in this adaptation from the novel, in which the thirties are retro imagined in the forties, before the end of the war. The way in which the fugitive of a concentration camp is helped are conditioned by circumstances out of any established rule, but by the convenience of the daily activity of a kind of circle of friends, occasionally concerned by the idea for putting someone near another town, as which it seems with a port by night where he is lodged during a while at a restaurant with rooms. The fact that the young maid was in love for him is mere chance for the protagonist of the scape, which was at the risk of failure by the pressure of the local authorities. In a kind of cat and rat gamble with traditionally oppression, that took the genre of smugglers and sailors before any departure abroad, whose sequence is shown with such a domestic darkness for those who think about that with discretion, if anyway it was forbidden without people support in these conditions of humankind and bravery.