An intriguingly stylized war drama even more intriguingly released during its wartime era, The Seventh Cross cultivates an atmosphere of almost ethereal dread and populates it with surprisingly humanized German characters from screenwriter and songwriter Helen Deutsch (National Velvet, Lili). In 1936 Nazi Germany, seven men escape from a concentration camp. One by one they are captured and literally crucified, but one remains empty, one intended for George Heisler (Spencer Tracy), who flees to his hometown of Meinz and struggles to figure out who can be trusted when everyone could be out to get you. He eventually runs into an old pal (Hume Cronyn) who puts him up with he and his naive but caring wife (Jessica Tandy) until George can affect safe passage out, leading to strife for all involved.
During World War II, money was short so talented people found ways to float spectacle with style, but even knowing that, rookie director Fred Zinneman givesThe Seventh Cross a notably dreamlike atmosphere, at least in its opening sequence, featuring fog-strewn shots of the seven crosses, and having one of the other six (Ray Collins) narrate the film (sparingly, thankfully). From there the atmosphere is so oppressive but consistently spare. It’s a very quiet movie, and all the terror is in those silences. Tracy is his usual upstanding but morally complicated self (as opposed to perpetual protagonists like Gary Cooper, Tracy always radiated a sense of patriarichal respectability without seeming like too much of a goodie-goodie, if you will).
For the rest of the cast, Hume Cronyn seems to be one of Hollywood’s forgotten favorites, but he always brings humanity to roles despite always looking like Rick Moranis. Agnes Moorehead and Jessica Tandy (in her debut) provide worthwhile touches, and the film’s later half is devoted to a sudden love affair between Tracy and conflicted hotel maid Signe Hasso, who calls the Gestapo when she sees him in the paper, until she realizes that she’s strongly attracted to him and understands his plight. These scenes become a little more typical, and it’s to the film’s detriment that they become the exclusive focus of the second half before fizzling in an abrupt climax, but that sense of tension rarely drifts too far, and keeps the film in check, allowing the style and the content to rise to the top.
It’s interesting to see how some of the jingoistic fervor had apparently dissipated by 1944, not that people didn’t love their country, but they were at least willing to see the German people as human beings, and understand the plight of their situation: all Germans aren’t evil, many were just trying to live their lives as well as they could while doing what’s right, something made notoriously difficult in a world where everybody could be informing and nobody can truly trust a soul. That at least one mainstream film reached this conclusion before the Americans were storming Normandy is quite unusual indeed, and it is that sense of vision that makes The Seventh Cross notable in the annals of cinema.
[Grade: 8/10 (B) / #9 (of 17) of 1944]
myboringlife42 