In an ongoing consideration of whether Fred Zinnemann From Here to Eternity) belongs in the first rank of Hollywood directors, TCM helped me out by screening three of his early feature films. "The Seventh Cross" was the first hit and the only one that is in the epinions database. (The other two were the silly "My Brother Talks to Horses" with a charming, young (pre-hip) Peter Lawford, and a taut noire about unfinished business between two survivors of Nazi POW camps, played by Robert Ryan and Van Heflin.)
Beside being a breakthrough in the Vienna-born Zinnemann's career, "The Seventh Cross" is notable as Jessica Tandy's Hollywood debut, for an interesting (and Oscar-nominated) performance by her husband (from 1942 until her death in 1994) Hume Cronyn, and for some German Expressionism Gone to Hollywood black and white cinematography by Karl Freund. I don't think that it is any secret that the "cinema noire" look was pioneered by refugees from Hitler. The play of heavy shadows in "The Seventh Cross" connects back to Freund's work for Fritz Lang in "Metropolis", for F. W. Murnau in "The Last Laugh" and "Tartuffe" and in the 1920 horror classic "The Golem." In America, he shot Tod Browning's "Dracula" with Bela Lugosi before being promoted to such prestige projects as "The Good Earth" (for which he won an Oscar), "Pride and Prejudice," and "Camille." How he landed in television (the head cinematographer of "I Love Lucy" and "Our Miss Brooks") in the early 1950s is, I'm sure, an interesting story, but one I don't know.
Back in 1944, some filmgoers may have known who Freund was and Hume Cronyn had played fairly significant roles in two 1943 Alfred Hitchcock films, "Shadow of a Doubt" and "Lifeboat." Tandy and Zinnemann were unknown, and "The Seventh Cross" was a Spencer Tracy movie, one of the better ones, one of the movies in which he didn't mug or blather. He delivers some overwritten voiceover narration (another link to the genre of cinema noire), but his performance rests on nonverbal reactions. Tracy had a good voice, but I prefer the Tracy movies in which he did not talk very much (Bad Day at Black Rock, Judgment at Nuremberg), and especially did not put on a "man of the common people" accent (as in Tortilla Flat, Old Man and the Sea, or Captains Courageous).
The movie begins by showing seven men (described as "leftists") escaping from a Nazi prison camp in 1936. When the first one is captured, the vicious camp commandant has him hung up on a cross for all the other prisoners to see and has similar crosses prepared for the other six escapees. Within a day, four are in use. Three men have made it to Mainz. The star of the picture is, of course, one. George Heisler (Tracy) has an address to go to for help, but the Gestapo has taken away the occupant already.
Heisler gets unexpected help from strangers, including Agnes Moorehead slipping money into the pocket of a suit she made for one of the captured escapees, and a Jewish doctor (Steven Geray). He runs into a naive worker he'd known, Paul Roeder (Cronyn) who invites him to dinner and to stay the night before realizing Heisler has escaped from a Nazi camp. Leisel Roeder (Tandy) provides hospitality as a dutiful wife and is eventually frightened, but continues to obey her husband.
Making contact with the underground (very deep underground!) is complicated and made more complicated by a hard-to-believe romance with a barmaid (Signe Hasso). Given that both of Zinnemann's parents died in death camps, the transformation of Heisler's bitterness is an interesting development. The bitter prisoner who escapes is impressed by and grateful to those whose souls had not been colonized by the Nazis. At the start of the movie, it seems that the only "good Germans" are imprisoned. The movie was made while the war was still being waged, but rather than being anti-German propaganda, it seems to look ahead to the occupation of Germany aiming to rehabilitate rather than to punish Germans. (If the film had been made at the time in which it is set, HUAC might have identified it as "premature anti-fascism," and the film celebrates a seeming communist cell along with uncorrupted proletarians but apparently escaped the gaze of those ferreting subversives who had portrayed leftist anti-Nazis sympathetically.)
"The Seventh Cross" is one of the wartime movies showing resistance by some surprising individuals within Hitler's domain. Other notable examples made during the war are Lee J. Cobb in "The Moon Is Down" from Steinbeck's novel, Walter Brennan in Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die, Fred MacMurray in Above Suspicion, Joseph Cotten in Journey Into Fear, and Charles Laughton in Jean Renoir's "This Land Is Mine." An example in a postwar film is Kirk Douglas in The Heroes of Telemark.
Aside from its interest as a historical document is it viable as a thriller? Not as much as Zinnemann's later "Day of the Jackal," but still interesting. The romantic interlude gets in the way, in part because Tracy was not a romantic leading man (consider how unerotic the onscreen relationship with his offscreen mistress, Katherine Hepburn, was, as much as she looked at him with adoration...) and in part because his character is preoccupied with escape, and does not seem the sort to be diverted by a night of love (or whatever). The pacing could be tauter, but the photography is striking, the plot is serviceable, and there are well-written quite disparate characters, Cronyn's Paul Roeder being the most interesting.
There are almost as many shots of clocks in "The Seventh Cross" as in "High Noon." If a visual "signature" is necessary to distinguish a director as an "auteur," this is a candidate. Thematically, Paul Roeder taking a high-risk stand for what he believe is right connects to Prewitt and Maggio in From Here to Eternity, Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons," Marshall Will Kane in "High Noon," Joe Parkson in "Act of Violence," Lily in "Julia," the sergeant and the boy in The Search , etc. (Can I make the case for "Oklahoma!"? Maybe not, though there is something of the obsessive concern with time there, too). I think Zinnemann is underrated. (Stay tuned?)
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