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In those days, I still believed in the future
It doesn't sound like much to call a movie the most important film about the Holocaust to come out of wartime Hollywood. Once you get past the handful of outliers headed by Lubitsch, the bar is in hell, baking bagels. The Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations did not pull in the crowds in Peoria. Thanks to the combined filtration of the Production Code Administration and the Office of War Information, even films that engage with the ideologies rather than the aesthetics of Nazism can start to feel as thin on Tinseltown ground as a minyan in Sodom. I don't know what else to call None Shall Escape (1944), a Columbia B-effort that does not play like any other American propaganda of my experience. It plays like a pre-Code at the height of World War II, a crash-in from some parallel dream factory with far less need to cushion the reality shock of genocide or the humanity that commits it. It's harsh, cheap, uncannily unstuck in time. Nothing in the literature has knocked me for such a loop since Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966).
In part it is a study of a kind I had not thought popularly available until the publication of Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a case history of terminal Nazification. The film isn't subtle, but neither is it stupid. The age of onset is World War I. To the small and oft-annexed town of Lidzbark, it made no difference for years that their schoolteacher was ethnically German, especially since the culturally Polish community around him was territorially Prussian at the time, but in the demobbed spring of 1919, as the restoration of Poland and the breaking of Germany rest on the same table at Versailles, it matters fiercely to Alexander Knox's Wilhelm Grimm. He greets his homecoming ironically, cautiously: "You're very generous to an enemy." It would go over better without his newfangled Aryan hauteur. It marks him out more than his soldier's greatcoat or his self-conscious limp, this damage he's taken beyond shell-shock, into conspiracy theory that horrifies his long-faithful fiancée of Marsha Hunt's Marja Pacierkowski all the more for the earnestness with which he expects her to share it. Disability and defeat have all twisted up for him into the same embittered conviction of betrayal, all the riper for the consolation of the Dolchstoßlegende, the romantic nationalism of Lebensraum, the illusion of Völkisch identity as an unalterable fact to cling to in a world of broken bodies and promises where even the home front is no longer where he left it. "You don't understand. Nothing's the same anymore . . . The future lies in victory, not in freedom." Like an illness that protects itself, even as his nascent fascism kills his romance deader than any disfigurement, it feeds his hurt back into the seamless cycle of grievance and justification until his frustration finds itself a suitably inappropriate outlet—raping a smitten student to revenge the slur of his jilting on his Teutonic manhood. More than proto-Nazisploitation, the assault seals his willingness to take out his insecurities on the innocent. By the time the action rolls around to Munich in 1923, it suspends no disbelief to find him serving a comfortable six months for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. By 1934, he's a decorated Alter Kämpfer, a veteran of the Reichstag fire and the Night of the Long Knives, a full oak-leaved SS-Gruppenführer who can turn his own brother over to the Gestapo without a blush and effectively abduct his nephew into the Hitler Youth; in short, exactly the sort of proper party man whom the seizure of Poland in 1939 should return to Lidzbark in the sick-joke-made-good plum role of Reichskommissar. Technically quartered in Poznań, he can't miss the chance to grind the supremacy of the Reich personally into the faces of the "village clowns" who last saw their schoolmaster fleeing in disgrace. "The best," he remarks pleasantly over his plenitude of coffee and brandy, the likes of which his silent, captive hosts have not seen in war-straitened weeks, "and not enough of it." He has already presided over a book-burning and the filming of a newsreel of propaganda, a casually cruel calling card. All the rest of the Generalplan Ost can wait until the morning.
None Shall Escape would be historically impressive enough if it merely, seriously traced the process by which an unexceptional person could accumulate a catalogue of atrocities that would sound like anti-German propaganda if they had not already been documented as standard operating procedures of the Third Reich. Concentration camps in their less crematory aspects were old news since 1933. The 1970's did not invent the Wehrmachtsbordelle. Knox ghosts on his German accent after a few lines, but it doesn't mar his performance that could once again come off like a national metonym and instead makes a mesmeric awful object of a man accelerating through moral event horizons like a railgun, never once given the easy out of psychopathology—in a screen niche dominated by brutes, fools, and sadists, the demonstrably intelligent, emotionally layered Wilhelm who has outsourced his conscience to his Führer stands out like a memo from Arendt. The political detailing of his descent is equally noteworthy and particularly acute in its insistence on a ladder of dreadful choices rather than irresistible free-fall, but I can get nuanced Nazis elsewhere in Hollywood if I need them. I can't get the eleven o'clock shocker of this picture which feels like a correction of the record, not a first-generation entry in that record itself. It goes farther than uncensored acknowledgement of what no wartime production would call the Shoah, remarkable already in light of official directives not to dramatize even the known extent of Nazi antisemitism unduly. Shot in the late summer into fall of 1943, it is the earliest film I have seen in my life to show that the Jews fought.
Representing Jewish resistance, of course, requires at least some initial representation of Jewish persecution and None Shall Escape does it so baldly and with such specificity that even knowing it had to pass the infinitely prim and tactically expedient musters of the PCA and the OWI, it seems totally divorced from even its well-made contemporaries which visited their Nazi terrors on the more universalized, implicitly American stand-ins of Gentile victims. Cavalry horses are stabled in the looted synagogue, its sifrei Torah burnt like so much trash by unvarnished day. The white brands of Jude-starred armbands appear on certain townsfolk in the depopulated market square. Still naive enough of the Nazi ethos not to understand that her question answers itself, Dorothy Morris' Janina Pacierkowski demands with the directness she inherited from her mother, "Why do you treat them like animals? Worse than animals!" A true pre-Code might have deployed cruder language, but the point gets across with klaxons when Richard Crane's Lieutenant Willi Grimm, his uncle's apt pupil since the age of fifteen, cheerfully settles the debate: "Anyway, those weren't people, those were Jews." Joseph Breen was such a notoriously weapons-grade antisemite, only the wartime imperative to show the enemy at their worst must have made him sign off on the scene of the deportation of Lidzbark's Jews, chaotically floodlit by the tarpaulin-shrouded trucks from which the frightened protests of families are torn and shoved across the mud-glistening tracks where the boxcars awaiting their hell-bound train stand gaping for their human freight, as familiar with their suitcases and bundles of pointlessly meager possessions as if Henryk Ross had photographed them at Radogoszcz station, one of his clandestine, priceless negatives that would not be recovered to bear witness until after the liberation of what was left of the Łódź Ghetto in 1945. It feels like a nightmare in the style of a docudrama, noir-sunk. It feels like falling through time. "I merely carry out orders," Wilhelm dismisses his accountability for mass murder as negligently as if the audience should hiss a Nuremberg defense when they hear one. With equal rhetorical prescience and outrage, Henry Travers' Father Warecki declares, "Before God and man, I protest this crime against humanity!" Richard Hale may not have been Jewish, but for his barn-burner of a speech as Rabbi Levin he should at least have rated a nomination for righteous among nations: ordered by the Reichskommissar to Judas-goat, Judenrat his congregation compliantly to their deaths, he calls them to arms instead.
"My people! Be calm. Listen to me. Let us prepare ourselves to face the supreme moment in our lives. This is our last journey. It doesn't matter if it's long or short. For centuries we have sought only peace. We have submitted to many degradations believing that we will achieve justice through reason. We have tried to take our place honestly and decently alongside all mankind to help make a better world, a world in which all men would live as free neighbors. We have hoped and prayed. But now we see that hope was not enough. What good has it done to submit? Submission brought us rare moments in history when we were tolerated. Tolerated! Is there any greater degradation than to be tolerated? To be permitted to exist? We have submitted too long. If we want equality and justice we must take our place alongside all other oppressed peoples, regardless of race or religion. Their fight is ours. Ours is theirs. We haven't much time left. By our actions we will be remembered. This is our last free choice. Our moment in history. And I say to you—let us choose to fight! Here! Now!"
The Jews of Lidzbark fight. Futilely, fearlessly, rushing bayonet-fixed soldiers with bare hands, they force the messiness of a massacre instead of a complacently tidy disposal until even the children in their mothers' arms lie tumbled in machine-gunned heaps half in, half out of the slat-sided cars like a presentiment of the camps which no Allied soldier had yet documented, a corpse-pile out of the feverish reels that George Stevens couldn't stop filming at Dachau because it was real and unspeakable and the record of history required it. Shot point-blank by a man whom he once aided without expectation of recompense, Rabbi Levin is still on his feet to make his own foretelling to his captain of murderers: "We will never die. It will be you. All of you." In the charcoal shadows of the charnel cars, braced on the crossbuck that is the one upright thing among all the loose-tossed dead, he recites their Kaddish—it sounds as my grandparents said it, Ashkenazi-soft and alef-dark—to the end. How an American Jewish viewer of early 1944 would have received this scene, I cannot imagine. Mid-2025 with history derailing inside my head at bullet-speed, this American Jewish viewer can only hear mir veln zey iberlebn. It doesn't matter that once again a Jewish plight is screened primarily through goyishe eyes, that its eloquent militancy of doikayt and tikkun olam rings perhaps more arbeter-bund than yeshiva, even that it is unreasonable of me to bear it a grudge for that line about the last journey when the partisan anthem of "Zog nit keyn mol" was still freshly written by Hirsh Glik. Like the real-life testaments of the Bielski partisans or the Oyneg Shabes, the stark, unsentimentalized bloodbath avows that the Jews of Europe were not the sheep to the slaughterhouse that persist in the popular imagination of abject victimhood. It's an extraordinary statement, especially from a studio like Columbia which was more famous for its screwball comedies and its Capra-corn than its head-on political critique; nothing in its prior wartime catalogue suggested it would come out swinging at the Nazis and the PCA in one. If it could afford only one Jewish character of any depth in the picture, a chess shark of a rabbi who spurns a Shylock insinuation and goes down fighting is damn unparalleled. He's not even a denizen of the hell of a good video store next door. One of those coins in the field of time, he was just waiting to be discovered where he always was, right here.
It was not clairvoyance, even if None Shall Escape often gives the impression of working just ahead of the rim of history. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Motion Picture Story was shared between the German and Austrian Jewish refugees of Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than, who had brought their respective border-crossing experiences to Hollywood—Neumann had even been born in Lidzbark when it was still German Lautenburg. Director Andre de Toth was Hungarian and, for a change, not Jewish, but his very late exit from occupied Europe had gifted him with a disturbing, exceptional qualification to treat the subject of Nazi atrocities on screen: caught in Warsaw when the balloon went up, he had been pressed into service in Nazi propaganda. One of the sickest, most pungent details in the movie is the Theresienstadt-like newsreel of a queue of desperately smiling townsfolk to whom the Nazis dispense a largesse of bread and soup which is snatched from their mouths the second the cameras stop rolling, the rabbi himself unceremoniously jerked from the line he was originally forced into so as not to spoil the picture of placid, grateful Poles with a Jew. It was de Toth's recreation of an incident it had haunted him so much to participate in that he spoke of it only toward the end of his life, its ghost hidden until then in the plain sight of the silver screen. Did he lend his piratical eyepatch to the wounded Wilhelm for the same reason, like Pressburger's stolen memories to Karl Braun? Who among this émigré crew had seen the loading of a night train bound to the east? The closeness to reality of this film is a double edge. Wrapped in its near-future frame of a post-war, Nuremberg-style trial in whose hindsight all these horrors are supposed to be safely past and in the process of redress, None Shall Escape locks itself into uncertainty because it knows, as its more sanitized age-mates do not have to, that when the lights come up the trains are still running on time. It can't close the loop of its own title. When all the testimonies have concluded in the case of Wilhelm Grimm, Reich Commissioner of Western Poland, charged in the absence of a definition of genocide with the "unspeakable miseries" of "the wanton extermination of human life," the notably international tribunal does not pronounce sentence: it turns the future over to the audience. The verdict is left to the fourth wall to render as a line of Allied flags flutters expectantly as if over the as yet unimagined headquarters of the UN. Like a lost soul stripped of everything but the doctrine that cost him it all, Wilhelm screamed out his die-hard Reich-dream straight to us: "You've just won another battle in a fight which has not ended . . . You cannot crush us! We will rise again and again!" In a more recognizable war movie, his cry would be the impotence of defeat, but in this one? Is he right? Is there such a thing as justice for crimes against humanity? Is it enough to keep us from churning out more conspiratorial ideologies, more genocidal wars? It isn't spellmaking, it's a thought experiment so suddenly, darkly reflective that if Technician Fourth Grade Rod Serling hadn't been in boot camp with the rest of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment at the time of production, I'd blame him for a hand in its black mirror. If I shake it under the present world-historical conditions, the magic eight-ball seems to be coming up SOL. Do I need to state that this picture commercially flopped?
Fortunately for historical memory, None Shall Escape was never entirely lost. I found it in the Criterion Channel's Noir and the Blacklist and while I could argue with the first categorization, the second was an indisputable hat trick: Marsha Hunt, Alexander Knox, and screenwriter Lester Cole, the card-carrying Communist of the Hollywood Ten. Sucks to McCarthy, it can be readily watched on YouTube and the Internet Archive and even to my surprise obtained on Sony Pictures Blu-Ray. DP Lee Garmes does his low-key considerable best to compensate for a budget like Samuel Bischoff turned the couch upside down and shook it for change and a moth flew out. The resourceful art direction of Lionel Banks does the same for a Western set that needs to be in Poland. I am afraid that after catching the back-to-back breadth of his shape-changing in The Sea Wolf (1941) and this film, I am unlikely ever to be sensible on the subject of Alexander Knox again, especially when his performance is one of those high-wire acts that can't once glance down at the actor's vanity for reassurance or out to the audience for sympathy, but Hunt matches him so intensely and effortlessly over their quarter-century entwined like a marriage on the wrong side of the mirror, somewhere off in the forking paths of alternate film history they should have been less inimically reteamed. "There's your Weimar Republic for you." Of course I don't need to reach back into 1919 or even 1944 to find a Wilhelm, but it matters to have the reminder of a Rabbi Levin. We will outlive them. This choice brought to you by my free backers at Patreon.
In part it is a study of a kind I had not thought popularly available until the publication of Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a case history of terminal Nazification. The film isn't subtle, but neither is it stupid. The age of onset is World War I. To the small and oft-annexed town of Lidzbark, it made no difference for years that their schoolteacher was ethnically German, especially since the culturally Polish community around him was territorially Prussian at the time, but in the demobbed spring of 1919, as the restoration of Poland and the breaking of Germany rest on the same table at Versailles, it matters fiercely to Alexander Knox's Wilhelm Grimm. He greets his homecoming ironically, cautiously: "You're very generous to an enemy." It would go over better without his newfangled Aryan hauteur. It marks him out more than his soldier's greatcoat or his self-conscious limp, this damage he's taken beyond shell-shock, into conspiracy theory that horrifies his long-faithful fiancée of Marsha Hunt's Marja Pacierkowski all the more for the earnestness with which he expects her to share it. Disability and defeat have all twisted up for him into the same embittered conviction of betrayal, all the riper for the consolation of the Dolchstoßlegende, the romantic nationalism of Lebensraum, the illusion of Völkisch identity as an unalterable fact to cling to in a world of broken bodies and promises where even the home front is no longer where he left it. "You don't understand. Nothing's the same anymore . . . The future lies in victory, not in freedom." Like an illness that protects itself, even as his nascent fascism kills his romance deader than any disfigurement, it feeds his hurt back into the seamless cycle of grievance and justification until his frustration finds itself a suitably inappropriate outlet—raping a smitten student to revenge the slur of his jilting on his Teutonic manhood. More than proto-Nazisploitation, the assault seals his willingness to take out his insecurities on the innocent. By the time the action rolls around to Munich in 1923, it suspends no disbelief to find him serving a comfortable six months for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. By 1934, he's a decorated Alter Kämpfer, a veteran of the Reichstag fire and the Night of the Long Knives, a full oak-leaved SS-Gruppenführer who can turn his own brother over to the Gestapo without a blush and effectively abduct his nephew into the Hitler Youth; in short, exactly the sort of proper party man whom the seizure of Poland in 1939 should return to Lidzbark in the sick-joke-made-good plum role of Reichskommissar. Technically quartered in Poznań, he can't miss the chance to grind the supremacy of the Reich personally into the faces of the "village clowns" who last saw their schoolmaster fleeing in disgrace. "The best," he remarks pleasantly over his plenitude of coffee and brandy, the likes of which his silent, captive hosts have not seen in war-straitened weeks, "and not enough of it." He has already presided over a book-burning and the filming of a newsreel of propaganda, a casually cruel calling card. All the rest of the Generalplan Ost can wait until the morning.
None Shall Escape would be historically impressive enough if it merely, seriously traced the process by which an unexceptional person could accumulate a catalogue of atrocities that would sound like anti-German propaganda if they had not already been documented as standard operating procedures of the Third Reich. Concentration camps in their less crematory aspects were old news since 1933. The 1970's did not invent the Wehrmachtsbordelle. Knox ghosts on his German accent after a few lines, but it doesn't mar his performance that could once again come off like a national metonym and instead makes a mesmeric awful object of a man accelerating through moral event horizons like a railgun, never once given the easy out of psychopathology—in a screen niche dominated by brutes, fools, and sadists, the demonstrably intelligent, emotionally layered Wilhelm who has outsourced his conscience to his Führer stands out like a memo from Arendt. The political detailing of his descent is equally noteworthy and particularly acute in its insistence on a ladder of dreadful choices rather than irresistible free-fall, but I can get nuanced Nazis elsewhere in Hollywood if I need them. I can't get the eleven o'clock shocker of this picture which feels like a correction of the record, not a first-generation entry in that record itself. It goes farther than uncensored acknowledgement of what no wartime production would call the Shoah, remarkable already in light of official directives not to dramatize even the known extent of Nazi antisemitism unduly. Shot in the late summer into fall of 1943, it is the earliest film I have seen in my life to show that the Jews fought.
Representing Jewish resistance, of course, requires at least some initial representation of Jewish persecution and None Shall Escape does it so baldly and with such specificity that even knowing it had to pass the infinitely prim and tactically expedient musters of the PCA and the OWI, it seems totally divorced from even its well-made contemporaries which visited their Nazi terrors on the more universalized, implicitly American stand-ins of Gentile victims. Cavalry horses are stabled in the looted synagogue, its sifrei Torah burnt like so much trash by unvarnished day. The white brands of Jude-starred armbands appear on certain townsfolk in the depopulated market square. Still naive enough of the Nazi ethos not to understand that her question answers itself, Dorothy Morris' Janina Pacierkowski demands with the directness she inherited from her mother, "Why do you treat them like animals? Worse than animals!" A true pre-Code might have deployed cruder language, but the point gets across with klaxons when Richard Crane's Lieutenant Willi Grimm, his uncle's apt pupil since the age of fifteen, cheerfully settles the debate: "Anyway, those weren't people, those were Jews." Joseph Breen was such a notoriously weapons-grade antisemite, only the wartime imperative to show the enemy at their worst must have made him sign off on the scene of the deportation of Lidzbark's Jews, chaotically floodlit by the tarpaulin-shrouded trucks from which the frightened protests of families are torn and shoved across the mud-glistening tracks where the boxcars awaiting their hell-bound train stand gaping for their human freight, as familiar with their suitcases and bundles of pointlessly meager possessions as if Henryk Ross had photographed them at Radogoszcz station, one of his clandestine, priceless negatives that would not be recovered to bear witness until after the liberation of what was left of the Łódź Ghetto in 1945. It feels like a nightmare in the style of a docudrama, noir-sunk. It feels like falling through time. "I merely carry out orders," Wilhelm dismisses his accountability for mass murder as negligently as if the audience should hiss a Nuremberg defense when they hear one. With equal rhetorical prescience and outrage, Henry Travers' Father Warecki declares, "Before God and man, I protest this crime against humanity!" Richard Hale may not have been Jewish, but for his barn-burner of a speech as Rabbi Levin he should at least have rated a nomination for righteous among nations: ordered by the Reichskommissar to Judas-goat, Judenrat his congregation compliantly to their deaths, he calls them to arms instead.
"My people! Be calm. Listen to me. Let us prepare ourselves to face the supreme moment in our lives. This is our last journey. It doesn't matter if it's long or short. For centuries we have sought only peace. We have submitted to many degradations believing that we will achieve justice through reason. We have tried to take our place honestly and decently alongside all mankind to help make a better world, a world in which all men would live as free neighbors. We have hoped and prayed. But now we see that hope was not enough. What good has it done to submit? Submission brought us rare moments in history when we were tolerated. Tolerated! Is there any greater degradation than to be tolerated? To be permitted to exist? We have submitted too long. If we want equality and justice we must take our place alongside all other oppressed peoples, regardless of race or religion. Their fight is ours. Ours is theirs. We haven't much time left. By our actions we will be remembered. This is our last free choice. Our moment in history. And I say to you—let us choose to fight! Here! Now!"
The Jews of Lidzbark fight. Futilely, fearlessly, rushing bayonet-fixed soldiers with bare hands, they force the messiness of a massacre instead of a complacently tidy disposal until even the children in their mothers' arms lie tumbled in machine-gunned heaps half in, half out of the slat-sided cars like a presentiment of the camps which no Allied soldier had yet documented, a corpse-pile out of the feverish reels that George Stevens couldn't stop filming at Dachau because it was real and unspeakable and the record of history required it. Shot point-blank by a man whom he once aided without expectation of recompense, Rabbi Levin is still on his feet to make his own foretelling to his captain of murderers: "We will never die. It will be you. All of you." In the charcoal shadows of the charnel cars, braced on the crossbuck that is the one upright thing among all the loose-tossed dead, he recites their Kaddish—it sounds as my grandparents said it, Ashkenazi-soft and alef-dark—to the end. How an American Jewish viewer of early 1944 would have received this scene, I cannot imagine. Mid-2025 with history derailing inside my head at bullet-speed, this American Jewish viewer can only hear mir veln zey iberlebn. It doesn't matter that once again a Jewish plight is screened primarily through goyishe eyes, that its eloquent militancy of doikayt and tikkun olam rings perhaps more arbeter-bund than yeshiva, even that it is unreasonable of me to bear it a grudge for that line about the last journey when the partisan anthem of "Zog nit keyn mol" was still freshly written by Hirsh Glik. Like the real-life testaments of the Bielski partisans or the Oyneg Shabes, the stark, unsentimentalized bloodbath avows that the Jews of Europe were not the sheep to the slaughterhouse that persist in the popular imagination of abject victimhood. It's an extraordinary statement, especially from a studio like Columbia which was more famous for its screwball comedies and its Capra-corn than its head-on political critique; nothing in its prior wartime catalogue suggested it would come out swinging at the Nazis and the PCA in one. If it could afford only one Jewish character of any depth in the picture, a chess shark of a rabbi who spurns a Shylock insinuation and goes down fighting is damn unparalleled. He's not even a denizen of the hell of a good video store next door. One of those coins in the field of time, he was just waiting to be discovered where he always was, right here.
It was not clairvoyance, even if None Shall Escape often gives the impression of working just ahead of the rim of history. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Motion Picture Story was shared between the German and Austrian Jewish refugees of Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than, who had brought their respective border-crossing experiences to Hollywood—Neumann had even been born in Lidzbark when it was still German Lautenburg. Director Andre de Toth was Hungarian and, for a change, not Jewish, but his very late exit from occupied Europe had gifted him with a disturbing, exceptional qualification to treat the subject of Nazi atrocities on screen: caught in Warsaw when the balloon went up, he had been pressed into service in Nazi propaganda. One of the sickest, most pungent details in the movie is the Theresienstadt-like newsreel of a queue of desperately smiling townsfolk to whom the Nazis dispense a largesse of bread and soup which is snatched from their mouths the second the cameras stop rolling, the rabbi himself unceremoniously jerked from the line he was originally forced into so as not to spoil the picture of placid, grateful Poles with a Jew. It was de Toth's recreation of an incident it had haunted him so much to participate in that he spoke of it only toward the end of his life, its ghost hidden until then in the plain sight of the silver screen. Did he lend his piratical eyepatch to the wounded Wilhelm for the same reason, like Pressburger's stolen memories to Karl Braun? Who among this émigré crew had seen the loading of a night train bound to the east? The closeness to reality of this film is a double edge. Wrapped in its near-future frame of a post-war, Nuremberg-style trial in whose hindsight all these horrors are supposed to be safely past and in the process of redress, None Shall Escape locks itself into uncertainty because it knows, as its more sanitized age-mates do not have to, that when the lights come up the trains are still running on time. It can't close the loop of its own title. When all the testimonies have concluded in the case of Wilhelm Grimm, Reich Commissioner of Western Poland, charged in the absence of a definition of genocide with the "unspeakable miseries" of "the wanton extermination of human life," the notably international tribunal does not pronounce sentence: it turns the future over to the audience. The verdict is left to the fourth wall to render as a line of Allied flags flutters expectantly as if over the as yet unimagined headquarters of the UN. Like a lost soul stripped of everything but the doctrine that cost him it all, Wilhelm screamed out his die-hard Reich-dream straight to us: "You've just won another battle in a fight which has not ended . . . You cannot crush us! We will rise again and again!" In a more recognizable war movie, his cry would be the impotence of defeat, but in this one? Is he right? Is there such a thing as justice for crimes against humanity? Is it enough to keep us from churning out more conspiratorial ideologies, more genocidal wars? It isn't spellmaking, it's a thought experiment so suddenly, darkly reflective that if Technician Fourth Grade Rod Serling hadn't been in boot camp with the rest of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment at the time of production, I'd blame him for a hand in its black mirror. If I shake it under the present world-historical conditions, the magic eight-ball seems to be coming up SOL. Do I need to state that this picture commercially flopped?
Fortunately for historical memory, None Shall Escape was never entirely lost. I found it in the Criterion Channel's Noir and the Blacklist and while I could argue with the first categorization, the second was an indisputable hat trick: Marsha Hunt, Alexander Knox, and screenwriter Lester Cole, the card-carrying Communist of the Hollywood Ten. Sucks to McCarthy, it can be readily watched on YouTube and the Internet Archive and even to my surprise obtained on Sony Pictures Blu-Ray. DP Lee Garmes does his low-key considerable best to compensate for a budget like Samuel Bischoff turned the couch upside down and shook it for change and a moth flew out. The resourceful art direction of Lionel Banks does the same for a Western set that needs to be in Poland. I am afraid that after catching the back-to-back breadth of his shape-changing in The Sea Wolf (1941) and this film, I am unlikely ever to be sensible on the subject of Alexander Knox again, especially when his performance is one of those high-wire acts that can't once glance down at the actor's vanity for reassurance or out to the audience for sympathy, but Hunt matches him so intensely and effortlessly over their quarter-century entwined like a marriage on the wrong side of the mirror, somewhere off in the forking paths of alternate film history they should have been less inimically reteamed. "There's your Weimar Republic for you." Of course I don't need to reach back into 1919 or even 1944 to find a Wilhelm, but it matters to have the reminder of a Rabbi Levin. We will outlive them. This choice brought to you by my free backers at Patreon.
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Thank you! In return I am trying to do it justice.
(My non-film life could start any time now, though.)
*hugs*
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I hear it said one can have both at the same time! <3
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I think I used to! It was fun!
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Now I need to sit down and cry.
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*hugs*
I am glad to have seen it; it felt real, which was both the strength and the problem.
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Wow, what an incredible line.
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I figure he was a pretty good rabbi.
(It's an incredible scene.)
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It was really not like watching anything else. It could have been made just a couple of years later and it would have been so much more normal—Orson Welles in The Stranger (1946) famously introduced the American public to their first footage of the concentration camps, taken from a short documentary that had been constructed as evidence of war crimes for the Nuremberg trials. None Shall Escape has no such external authority to back up its claims of what was happening in occupied Europe, it's just right because it was made by people who had been there and seen it for themselves and if they couldn't know every awful detail, the details they offer are true. As for its exploration of what makes a fascist—the kind of person who's susceptible to it, what it offers them—it's almost a question Hollywood wouldn't be interested in answering for decades. There are a couple of post-war shorts like The House I Live In (1945) and Don't Be a Sucker (1947) that engage with the threat of prejudice as a tool to divide and conquer, but nothing else I have seen that just dives straight for the ethno-nationalist magical thinking in so many words and certainly not before it was a sure thing that it wouldn't win the war. It would be safer of the film if Wilhelm ever reached a point where he ceased to be recognizably human, but it's part of the point that he can't no matter how despicable his behavior, because what else but humanity commits such crimes against itself? Tigers don't ethnically-cleanse other tigers. And then there's the Jews fighting back, the fact that Marja herself, a middle-aged war widow, makes prepations to flee her occupied town and join the partisans in the forest, Criterion had a two-sentence description that did name-check the atrocities of the Holocaust and the psychology of fascism, but did not in any way prepare me for how much this film was going to feel like it had come from anywhere but the time and place it did and I am so glad it was able to.
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I'd never heard of it! I have seen some weird movies from WWII and it was not one of them! It got a restoration in 2018 and played the Coolidge as part of the National Center for Jewish Film's 21st Annual Film Festival and I still managed to miss it! It's as if it keeps being forgotten, for all the obvious reasons, and for all the obvious reasons, it shouldn't be.
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DID YOU KISS THE BRICK AT LEAST BEFORE YOU THREW IT AT ME, NEKHAMELE
...I think my heart may be a little like that, a little meant for the last expiatory fight. It would explain why it works so poorly here and now.
It was a real tight twist of a review; it's taken me days to say anything. Do you think I should watch it or do you think haha, no?
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ZISSELE, I HEARD THE FPO SAID
SELL YOUR GODDAMNED LIVES DEAR
...I think my heart may be a little like that, a little meant for the last expiatory fight. It would explain why it works so poorly here and now.
It's gotten you so far where you need to go.
*hugs*
It was a real tight twist of a review; it's taken me days to say anything. Do you think I should watch it or do you think haha, no?
You ask the hard questions! On the one hand, I want this film to have as much as possible of the viewership its historical statement been shorted for more than eighty years. On the other, my personal viewing experience was near-constant future shock coming and going. Its fake dead body count is very fake thanks to the general public restrictions of the '40's, but it could be awkward if extra-diegetic Lidzbark went boom.
(Finding out that one of the story writers set the whole mishegos in the town where he was born and the borders changed slap in 1919 which incidentally is not something American film devotes that much time to either was the moment at which it was really borne in on me just how many ghosts had been fit into this bad boy.)
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... Also, wow cousin Alex, you sure did take on a variety of roles. --Thanks for continuing to broaden my posthumous experience of my relative.
And Rabbi Levin's speech is GREAT. Worth bearing in mind.
You cannot crush us! We will rise again and again!" In a more recognizable war movie, his cry would be the impotence of defeat, but in this one? Is he right? --well I don't like what my eyes (never mind a magic eight-ball) are telling me on this, but if they rise and rise again, so will we.
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If I had an answer for that one, I'd have a Nobel Peace Prize, but remembering that violence does not have to be commited by some special class of monsters feels like an essential start. It's one of the points of this film that really got my attention. Wilhelm returning after the Armistice has every chance of reassimilating into his life in Lidzbark. He's had a normal, which is to say traumatic and dislocating war; he's gained a medal and lost a leg and come home to somewhere that no longer feels like it, not only because he's changed in his four years in the trenches but because it's changed in his absence right down to its nationality. The screenplay glosses past the existence of the Polish–Soviet War, presumably so as not to insult that expectantly fluttering flag at the play-out that belongs to the USSR, but it is otherwise unusually attentive to the chaos of borders that followed on the defeat of the Central Powers and the fact that one of those powers from which Poland had fought an actual insurgency to gain its independence was the German Empire. Some of his neighbors are still minded to reserve Poland for the Poles, but Wilhelm is explicitly assured by no less an authority than his town's priest that his post as schoolmaster and and his place in his fiancée's heart are still waiting for him. Without minimizing its hatefulness, it is not reading against the text to take his embrace of proto-Nazi theories as a coping mechanism for his war trauma, especially around his disability which it hits a real nerve to hear mocked by his unruly students, which he couldn't even write to his fiancée about because he was so afraid she would reject him as a broken man sight unseen. It's much less comforting to the American viewer of 1944 than if he had always been some saturnine, heel-clicking Prussian chauvinist instead of a peaceable teacher called up too soon after proposing to his Polish sweetheart—what kind of propaganda makes you think about the enemy as hurt and human and clutching at all the wrong straws? (What does it mean for our own soldiers, still at war and soaking up who knows what from it?) It makes his crimes worse, because he wasn't foredoomed to commit them. It's just terribly believable that he does.
... Also, wow cousin Alex, you sure did take on a variety of roles.
Seriously, if I had asked the universe for a demonstration of his range, I don't know what better it could have handed me. Van Weyden and Wilhelm are on diametrically opposed moral trajectories and each is sharp-lined, precisely shaded, totally convincing; both have something in them that the requirements of their narrative cannot explain. I recognize that there may be far less record of him working at the top of his game in films than there should have been, but even if he had just done these couple of roles, damn.
(Marsha Hunt, top-billed, also got absolutely snubbed by the Academy that year. Two of the Best Actress nominations for 1944 were for the same kind of longitudinal character study and while everyone would have been wiped out by Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, I'd still have run Hunt against Greer Garson or Bette Davis any day. I have liked her ever since stumbling across A Letter for Evie (1946) on TCM in 2009 and Marja is a powerhouse of a role, the kind I had not realized the actress had ever been handed. I am glad she lived long enough to see the film rediscovered and celebrated. Once again I could have survived it being a little less pertinent.)
--Thanks for continuing to broaden my posthumous experience of my relative.
You're welcome, although I still feel obscurely indebted to you. I am glad you do not mind.
And Rabbi Levin's speech is GREAT. Worth bearing in mind.
I had no idea it was coming. This film should be just as famous for its depiction of resistance as for its atrocities.
--well I don't like what my eyes (never mind a magic eight-ball) are telling me on this, but if they rise and rise again, so will we.
*hugs*
It's the only thing to do.
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*hugs*
I didn't know what to say to this comment. It's that kind of history, and this kind of time.