Paid Post: Film Review--"None Shall Escape"
Andre de Toth's haunting and powerful noir is a reminder of the perennial threat of fascism and its willfully monstrous adherents.
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Warning: Spoilers for the film follow.
As I’m wont to do, last week I was perusing the Criterion Channel, and I came upon the extraordinary list “Noir and the Blacklist.” Well, if you know anything about me, you know that I’m going to watch anything that has to do with the Blacklist and with film noir, so I immediately dove in. One of the films that immediately caught my eye was the unsubtly titled None Shall Escape. Directed by Andre de Toth from a screenplay by Lester Cole–who would later be branded as one of the Hollywood Ten–and staged as a Nuremberg-like trial, it uses both the present setting of the courtroom and a series of flashbacks to depict the gradual fall of Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox) from relatively mild-mannered schoolteacher to devout Nazi.
From the moment that Grimm returns from World War I it’s clear that his mind has been irreparably damaged by Germany’s defeat and by his own wounds, both physical and psychological. It’s not long before relations with his fiancee, Marsha Hunt’s Marja Pacierkowski, turn sour and, after assaulting a young village girl, he flees. It’s not long before he falls under the sway of Hitler and, as the years go by, he proves ever more ruthless in his pursuit of the Nazi agenda. Among other things he sends his own brother to a concentration camp, oversees the brutalizing of the Polish village in which he once served as school teacher, and shoots his own nephew in cold blood.