Kameraden auf See

In Neutrality (Neutralidad, 1949), the cinematic silence, the tight framing, and the slow, almost funereal pacing do not merely evoke a country at the margins of a global conflict - they perform, with meticulous calculation, a political operation of self-cleansing. The film, produced in the heart of Franco's Spain, projects not a memory of war, but a fabrication of detachment. At a time when Spain was beginning to seek legitimacy in the emerging Cold War order, this work functions as both historical plea and strategic obfuscation. The war is not shown - it is hinted, gestured toward, and curated through omissions. What is presented is a sanitized neutrality: humane, principled, and above all, necessary. What is concealed is the active and sustained complicity with the Axis powers.

Before analyzing the film's stylistic mechanisms, it is essential to acknowledge the extreme rarity of Second World War narratives in Spanish cinema. Unlike in American or British traditions - where the war became a dominant and commercially fertile genre - Spain's treatment of WWII in fiction was infrequent, tightly censored, and ideologically compromised. This scarcity makes comparative analysis all the more meaningful, even across different subgenres. Films such as The Patrol (La patrulla, 1954) and Ambassadors from Hell (Embajadores en el infierno, 1956), though distinct in tone and subject matter, represent rare cinematic engagements with Spain's indirect role in the conflict and share with Neutrality (Neutralidad, 1949) a common function: the negotiation of historical memory under Francoism.

The Patrol (La patrulla, 1954), centered on a small group of Spanish Blue Division soldiers on the Eastern Front, explores themes of physical hardship, isolation, and quiet despair without resorting to overt ideological triumphalism. Its tone is austere, and it registers the futility of war in long silences and exhausted gestures. In contrast, Ambassadors from Hell (Embajadores en el infierno, 1956) adopts a more pronounced nationalist tone, framing Spanish prisoners in Soviet gulags as martyrs whose suffering validates the regime's moral superiority. Against these, the film here under analysis diverges sharply in style and intention: it offers no battlefield, no martyrdom, no physical degradation - only subdued conviction and strategic cordiality. Its restraint is not the result of moral exhaustion or personal trauma, as in The Patrol, nor a call to patriotic endurance, as in Ambassadors from Hell, but a calculated posture of benevolence, designed to cleanse the state of its recent past.

From a cinematic standpoint, the film is defined by its careful restraint. The mise-en-scène favors sparse interiors and low-key lighting, creating a soft chiaroscuro that blurs moral clarity into aesthetic suggestion. The composition of the shots often avoids deep focus, relying instead on shallow framing that emphasizes emotional opacity. It's a visual world of doors half-closed, corridors dimly lit, and gestures that seem to be waiting for interpretation rather than offering one. This technical subtlety echoes the broader narrative strategy: offering no heroes, no obvious villains, just a mosaic of quiet interactions intended to suggest decency, calm, and a commitment to peace - qualities which, historically, the Francoist regime claimed retroactively, but did not embody in action.

The editing is methodical, bordering on static, with long takes that allow dialogue to unfold without emotional punctuation. The performances, though understated, often suffer from an over-rehearsed theatricality, as if the actors had been directed to suppress every trace of ideological conviction. This deliberate neutral tone is especially notable in interactions with foreign characters, who are treated with cordial balance - American and German alike - as if the film were attempting to correct a reputation already known to be compromised. Yet the very symmetry of that treatment becomes jarring when one remembers the brutal asymmetry with which the regime handled its own people. The film's moral evenhandedness abroad becomes hollow when measured against the absolute repression at home.

Therein lies one of the most disturbing contradictions of the film: while it goes to great lengths to depict Spain as a courteous, peace-seeking observer of global catastrophe, it entirely elides the domestic terror that followed its own civil war. The same government that extended a carefully staged diplomatic cordiality to both sides of the world conflict was simultaneously imprisoning, silencing, and executing thousands of its defeated internal enemies. The movie's tone of benevolence is not merely selective - it is hypocritical.

Historically, the regime's claim to neutrality was a myth. Spain may not have entered the war militarily, but its economic, logistical, and ideological support for the Axis was neither minor nor incidental. The export of tungsten (wolframio) to Nazi Germany, a crucial material for tank armor and artillery, was among the most strategically significant contributions made by any officially neutral state. Likewise, there were active supply lines and covert cooperation with Mussolini's Italy, as well as a robust intelligence exchange with German agencies. In the final years of the war, Spain also became a crucial escape route for fleeing Nazi officials - a network that operated with the knowledge and tacit approval of the state.

These facts were known to the Allies, who responded accordingly. Several Spanish merchant ships were sunk during the war, not by accident, but as deliberate signals that the so-called neutrality was not believed - or tolerated - by those fighting the Axis. The film makes oblique reference to these incidents, casting Spain as a misunderstood victim of wartime overreach. But such gestures serve only to reinforce the larger rhetorical operation: a state seeking moral absolution through cinematic narrative.

Technically, the film is competent but rarely bold. Its strength lies in how its very lack of emphasis becomes expressive: how omission itself becomes the vehicle of ideology. The absence of battlefields, uniforms, and direct violence is not a limitation but a strategy. This is not a war film that forgets war - it is one that attempts to displace it, to remove its stains from the hands of those who touched it too closely.

This displacement is where its true historical value lies. Not in its craft, which is often too subdued to leave lasting visual impressions, but in its function - as an instrument of post-war Francoist myth-making. To watch this film today is not to learn what Spain was during the war, but to witness what it wanted to be remembered as. And in that quiet, controlled remembering, the louder truths of complicity, repression, and opportunism remain carefully offscreen.

During World War II, in 1943, the Spanish ship Magellan sets sail from the port of Bilbao, commanded by a strict Spanish captain (Jesús Tordesillas) and several officers of various ranks (Jorge Mistral, Manuel Monroy, Valeriano Andrés) traveling across the Atlantic to America, in a sea infected by threatening dangers, especially being torpedoed. On board there is a motley crew such as a hidden stowaway (Manuel Luna), and a beautiful passenger, daughter (Adriana Benetti) of a millionaire (José Prada), who maintains an affair with one of the ship's officers, Ignacio (Jorge Mistral). The ship crosses the Atlantic Ocean, where it rescues survivors from a German ship wrecked by the enemy, picking up a German officer (Gerard Tichy). Shortly afterwards it also picks up castaways from a sunken American gunboat. The ship sets sail for Bermuda and then on to New York. But along the way the captain of the Spanish ship is threatened by the captain of a German submarine, who will torpedo the ship if he does not hand over the German officer on board.

A maritime drama that includes romance, emotion, a bit of tension and a brief study of the characters who feel the danger of war and being bombed, despite trying to comply with a strict neutrality that Spain enjoyed at the time. The film relies heavily on the love story between the unknown Italian actress Adriana Benetti and the always adequate Jorge Mistral. The real protagonist is the gallant Jorge Mistral, who was a Spanish actor, with a Puerto Rican father and a Catalan mother. He made his stage debut in 1943 and film debut in 1944. In the late fifties he lived in South America. He shot himself while living in Mexico City. Mistral was a great admirer of Pedro Armendáriz, who also shot himself after discovering he had cancer. Mistral himself had been diagnosed with duodenal cancer. In addition to the two main actors, Adriana Benetti and Jorge Mistral, it is worth highlighting Jesús Tordesillas as the fair, determined and intelligent captain of the ship, along with other notable supporting actors, such as: Manuel Monroy, Gérard Tichy, Manuel Luna, José Prada, Valeriano Andrés and Mario Berriatúa. The feature film stands out for its appropriate black and white setting, well photographed by Manuel Berenguer, a good cameraman with international projection, expert on superproductions made in Spain during the 60s and 70s, such as: ¨The Thin Red Line¨, ¨Custer of the West¨. ¨Bullets and Flesh¨, ¨Krakatoa, East of Java¨, ¨Wild Pampas¨, ¨King of Kings¨, ¨A City Called Bastarda¨ and ¨Son of the Gunslinger¨. At the end there is a tribute describing that the film has been made in memory of all the merchant ships bombed during the world war, making a long list of all of them.

The film was professionally directed by Eusebio Fernández Ardavín, although it feels somewhat old. He was the younger brother of the playwright Luis Fernández Ardavin. And his nephew was Cesar Fernández Arvadin who directed the classic ¨El Lazarillo De Tormes¨. Eusebio was a pioneering director and writer, known for directing some silent films and other early sound films, such as: "The Mysterious Adventurer" (1918), "The Legend of the Cemetery" (1917), "Dreams" (1917), "The Sixth Sense" (1929), "Wheel of Life" (42), "The Ensign" (1943) and "The Queen's Maid" (1946). Rating: 6/10. Acceptable and passable. The film will please completists and fans of classic Spanish cinema.