A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Marsha Hunt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marsha Hunt. Show all posts

Friday, May 2, 2025

None Shall Escape (André De Toth, 1944)

Marsha Hunt and Alexander Knox in None Shall Escape

Cast: Alexander Knox, Marsha Hunt, Henry Travers, Erik Rolf, Richard Crane, Dorothy Morris, Richard Hale, Ruth Nelson, Kurt Krueger, Shirley Mills, Elvin Field, Trevor Bardette, Frank Jaquet, Ray Teal. Screenplay: Lester Cole, Alfred Neumann, Joseph Than. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Ernst Toch. 

By imagining the trial of a Nazi officer for war crimes a year or so before the war actually ended, André De Toth's None Shall Escape took a risk of seeming dated once Germany was defeated and the exposure of the real atrocities committed during the Third Reich would be known. But it's an honorable effort, a gripping portrayal of what can happen when a person with grudges to nurse takes power and can enact revenge. It mostly steers away from Hollywood-style sentimentality in its depiction of the victims of Nazism. 

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