Ninguém Escapará ao Castigo

One can only wonder why this movie has been so little seen and given so little credit for its powerful message. This is the film Henry Travers (Clarence the angel in It's a Wonderful Life) should be remembered for; his portrayal of a Polish village priest is understated and unsentimental. Made in 1944, before World War II ended, it puts to rest the notion that the world did not comprehend the magnitude of Nazi evil. It's all here: Polish women forced into sexual slavery, Jews rounded up and murdered, young German men enamored with their cowardly power, the resistance, and the vain hope of ordinary people that such monstrous horror could never overtake a "civilized" world. The story is told in courtroom flashbacks comprising testimony during the trail of a Nazi officer, with convincing village scenes portraying life in the small town of Lidzbark, Poland, 70% of which was destroyed during the war. Made seventeen years before the release of the most widely recognized film about Nazi war crimes, "Judgment at Nuremburg," "None Shall Escape" is still difficult to find online, but it is one of the most astonishing screen achievements of World War II. Writers Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story ("Going My Way" won).

Judgment at Nuremburg was a very successful film of the early 1960s which brought the atrocities of the Nazis into clearer focus for millions. It won an Oscar for Maxmillan Schell, who did a very good job in the film. However, that film was executed with grand intellectual examination; a great deal of emotional dialogue, and a few illustrations of the hideous actions of the Third Reich. This film, None Shall Escape, is also fueled by a great performance by Alexander Knox as Grimm, but avoids the intellectualism of Judgment at Nuremburg. Instead, it focuses on the personal and visceral actions of those involved in the Polish occupation. Made some 20 years before the Schell film, and though a bit dated, it captures the visceral aspect of the inhumanity of the Nazis better than its successor. A highly underrated film.

This is a neat little B picture where World War II has already been one and Nuremberg like trials are taking place. One such trial is that of SS officer Alexander Knox and is told in flashback by several witnesses to his barbarism and cruelty.

Knox was a soldier in World War I and was wounded in the trenches and lost a leg. Before the war he lived in German occupied Poland as a school teacher and was not loved. Now that Poland has been reconstituted a nation Knox is even more unwelcome. So he makes his way to the new Weimar Republic in Germany and lives in Munich where another WW1 veteran is organizing a new Nazi party that excites Knox.

Even in this country many things can push someone into those kind of extreme political beliefs. Knox's individual story is never lost against the background of the historical events taking place. Knox is fascinating portrait of studied and carefully nurtured cruelty. As he rises in the party when war is declared and over in a manner of weeks in 1939 against Poland he makes sure he's assigned to that old village.

One thing that was most assuredly not true. The film notes the friendship of Catholic priest Henry Travers and Rabbi Richard Hale. The film deserves praise for recognizing what would later become the holocaust. But in pre WW2 Poland ain't no way Travers and Hale would be any kind of friends. The film was written by Lester Cole of the Hollywood 10 and it got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. On that point Cole was truly fantasizing.

Others to note in the cast are Marsha Hunt as the village schoolteacher who was a teen back when Knox was the teacher, Richard Crane as Knox's nephew whom he tries to create a mirror image of himself, and Trevor Bardette the grown version of a kid who hated Knox when he was the schoolteacher.

Maybe without big name stars this film has managed better than most wartime films to still be relevant today. Very relevant when looking at today's current climate.

"None Shall Escape" is a scathing investigation into the pysche of a Nazi. It explores the circumstances and personality traits of someone for whom the Nazi ideology would be welcome in an effort to explain how otherwise "normal" people could find themselves swept along by such a horrific movement. The Nazi at the film's center, played by Alexander Knox, finds himself drawn to the movement out of unresolved feelings of vengeance, a sense that he needs to get back at those who, in his mind, wronged him in some way. Basically it's the story of someone who has felt bullied himself becoming the bully, but on a monstrous scale.

I admired this film for trying to address Nazi atrocities as they were happening. For all of the hordes of Hollywood films made during WWII, I can't think of a single other one that actually showed Nazis gunning down Jews, or showed them being herded onto train cars for transportation to extermination camps. This film is also weirdly prescient; the framing device of the film is a fictional war crimes trial that anticipated the actual Nuremberg trials that would occur after the end of the war.

Knox gives a sterling and frightening performance. The film makes of his character a believable and very human brand of evil, so it's not easy to simply dismiss him as a beastly aberration.

"None Shall Escape" received an Oscar nomination for Best Motion Picture Story in 1944.

Grade: A-

This one is tough to watch -- as an earlier reviewer says. That is amazing considering the terrible films that came out right after WWII -- particularly the "liberation" of Dachau. It is clear that, as of the middle of the war, we knew exactly what was happening to the Jews. The sequence that shows a "transport" is vivid, almost as if based upon an actual newsreel (the Nazis liked to record their atrocities). Knox as the Nazi is brilliant. He charts the course of a Nazi career. That charting is particularly telling when contrasted with the reactions of other Germans, at first laughing at Hitler, then incredulous, and finally helpless. That contrast, however, permits us to believe in the "conversion" of one young Nazi officer to an anti-Nazi stance. That did happen, as witness the several attempts against Hitler, most notably the Staffenberg plot which occurred as this film was coming out. A strong film, effectively using flashbacks, accurately predicting the Nuremburg trails and others that would occur once the war ended.