The Seventh Cross | |
---|---|
Directed by | Fred Zinnemann |
Screenplay by | Helen Deutsch |
Based on | The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers |
Produced by | Pandro S. Berman |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Karl Freund |
Edited by | Thomas Richards |
Music by | Roy Webb |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Loew's Inc. |
Release date |
|
Running time | 110 minutes |
Language | English |
Budget | $1.3 million [1] |
Box office | $3.6 million [1] |
The Seventh Cross is a 1944 American drama film, set in Nazi Germany, starring Spencer Tracy as a prisoner who escaped from a concentration camp. The story chronicles how he interacts with ordinary Germans and gradually sheds his cynical view of humanity.
The film co-starred Hume Cronyn, who was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. It was the first film in which Cronyn appeared with his wife Jessica Tandy, and was among the first feature films directed by Fred Zinnemann; it was his first hit movie. [2]
The movie was adapted from the 1942 novel of the same name by the German refugee writer Anna Seghers. Produced in the midst of the Second World War, it was one of the few films made during the war to deal with the existence of Nazi concentration camps. [3]
In 1936 in Germany, seven prisoners escape from the fictitious Westhofen concentration camp (partly based on the real Osthofen concentration camp) near the Rhine. The escapees are: a writer, a circus performer, a schoolmaster, a farmer, a Jewish grocery clerk, George Heisler, and his friend, Wallau.
The camp commandant erects a row of seven crosses and vows to "put a man on each". The first to be apprehended is Wallau, who dies without giving up any information. With the dead Wallau narrating, the film follows Heisler as he makes his way across the German countryside, stealing a jacket to cover his prison garb. The Nazis round up other escaped prisoners, where they are returned to the camp and hung on crosses, suspended by their arms tied behind their backs. Through it all, the local population seems largely indifferent.
Heisler travels to his home city Mainz, where his former girlfriend, Leni, resides. She had promised to wait for him, but she has since married and refuses to help. He is given a suit of clothes by Mme. Marelli. Nearby, another of the escapees, the acrobat, leaps to his death to avoid being captured. With Heisler's options further limited, he goes to an old friend, Paul Roeder. Though Roeder is a factory worker with a wife and young children, he still risks all to help Heisler. Roeder gets in touch with the German underground, whose members risk their lives to help Heisler escape Germany. Through his exposure to this courage and kindness, and with the help toward the end of a sympathetic waitress, Heisler regains his faith in humanity. He escapes via boat to an unknown destination that he identifies as "probably Holland".
Anna Seghers, the author of the novel from which this movie was adapted, was a Communist, and Wallau and Heisler were Communists in the book. In Helen Deutsch's script, their political affiliation is not given. The political thrust of the film is thus about the anti-Fascist German resistance. [5] Refugees from Nazi Germany played many small roles, with the small uncredited bit part of a janitor played by Helene Weigel, the prominent German actress and wife of Bertolt Brecht. Hugh Beaumont has an uncredited role as a truck driver.
MGM publicity played up the fleeting romantic element between Tracy's character and that of the Swedish actress, Signe Hasso, with the tagline: "The revealing novel of a hunted man's search for love!" [6]
According to MGM records, the film earned $2,082,000 in the US and Canada and $1,489,000 elsewhere resulting in a profit of $1,021,000. [1]
Hume Cronyn received an Academy Award nomination as Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance as Paul Roeder. [7]
Jessie Alice Tandy was an English-American actress. Tandy appeared in over 100 stage productions and had more than 60 roles in film and TV, receiving an Academy Award, four Tony Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. She won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for playing Blanche DuBois in the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948, also winning for The Gin Game and Foxfire. Her films included Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Cocoon, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Nobody's Fool. At 80, she became the oldest actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Driving Miss Daisy.
Alfred Zinnemann was an Austrian-American film director and producer. He won four Academy Awards for directing and producing films in various genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir and play adaptations. He began his career in Europe before emigrating to the US, where he specialized in shorts before making 25 feature films during his 50-year career.
The Great Escape is a 1963 American epic war suspense adventure film starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough and featuring James Donald, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, Hannes Messemer, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, John Leyton and Angus Lennie. It was filmed in Panavision, and its musical score was composed by Elmer Bernstein.
Hume Blake Cronyn Jr. was a Canadian-American actor and writer. He appeared in many stage productions, television and film roles throughout his career, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Seventh Cross (1944).
Anna Seghers, is the pseudonym of German writer Anna Reiling, who was notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City (1941–47).
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Stalag Luft III was a Luftwaffe-run prisoner-of-war (POW) camp during the Second World War, which held captured Western Allied air force personnel.
The Seventh Cross is a novel by Anna Seghers, one of the better-known examples of German literature circa World War II. It was first published in Mexico by El Libro Libre In 1942. The English translation came out in the United States, in an abridged version, in September of the same year. The first full English translation, by Margot Bettauer Dembo, was published in 2018.
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Act of Violence is a 1949 American film noir directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor and Phyllis Thaxter. It was produced by Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Adapted for the screen by Robert L. Richards from a story by Collier Young, the film confronts the ethics of war and was one of the first to address the problems of World War II veterans.
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The Green Years is a 1946 American drama film directed by Victor Saville and featuring Charles Coburn, Tom Drake, Beverly Tyler and Hume Cronyn. It was adapted by Robert Ardrey and Sonya Levien from A. J. Cronin's 1944 novel of the same name. It tells the story of the coming-of-age of an Irish orphan in Scotland.
The Great Escape is a 1950 book by Australian writer Paul Brickhill that provides an insider's account of the 1944 mass escape from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III for British and Commonwealth airmen. As a prisoner in the camp, he participated in the escape plan but was debarred from the actual escape 'along with three or four others on grounds of claustrophobia'. The introduction to the book is written by George Harsh, an American POW at Stalag Luft III. This book was made into the 1963 film The Great Escape.
The Cross of Lorraine is a 1943 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer war film about French prisoners of war escaping a German prison camp and joining the French Resistance. Directed by Tay Garnett, starring Jean-Pierre Aumont and Gene Kelly, the film was partly based on Hans Habe's 1941 novel A Thousand Shall Fall. The title refers to the French Cross of Lorraine, which was the symbol of the Résistance and the Free French Forces chosen by Charles de Gaulle in 1942.
The Ninth Symphony of the German composer Hans Werner Henze was written in 1997.
Spark of Life is a concentration camp novel, written by Erich Maria Remarque in the year 1952.
The Mühlviertler Hasenjagd was a war crime in which 500 Soviet officers, who had revolted and escaped from the Mühlviertel subcamp of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp on 2 February 1945, were hunted down. Local civilians, soldiers and local Nazi organizations hunted down the escapees for three weeks, summarily executing most of them. Of the original 500 prisoners who took part in the escape attempt, eleven succeeded in remaining free until the end of the war. It was the largest escape in the history of the Nazi concentration camps.
Members of the German military were interned as prisoners of war in the United States during World War I and World War II. In all, 425,000 German prisoners lived in 700 camps throughout the United States during World War II.
The Osthofen concentration camp was an early Nazi concentration camp in Osthofen, close to Worms, Germany. It was established in March 1933 in a former paper factory. The camp was administered by the People's State of Hesse's Political Police, with guards first drawn from SA and SS, later only SS men. The first prisoners were mostly Communists or Social Democrats, but later Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists and non-political Jews were also sent to the camp.