I Escaped from the Gestapo

The Nazi menace has spread into America. Torgut Lane (Dean Jagger) is a forger prisoner. He escapes with help from a group of Nazi spies. He is forced to help them print counterfeit bills.

This film is also called No Escape. It's wartime propaganda. The premise is far from realistic. The story is messy. Torgut is way too blasé and that saps away any tension for the first half. The audience doesn't care about this guy and there is no rooting interest. The story is too bland for too long. There is a bit of noir style. It's a B-movie but it still needs to be thrilling. Even propaganda films need to be good.

A movie that would be confined to the dustbin of low-budget history if it were not infamous as the film Frances Farmer was making when she had her breakdown and was arrested in Hollywood, soon to be institutionalized for most of the rest of the decade. The notoriously cheap King Brothers of Monogram Studios must have wanted to use every scrap of film they had shot, for they use a very brief shot of Farmer, evidently taken on the only day of filming she completed on this project, in a montage sequence. The sight of Farmer, staring at the camera with a puzzled and perhaps frightened look on her face as she pulls a shawl over her head, is unforgettable and about the only thing worth remembering about this film.

Dean Jagger is a forger -- in the United States, not Europe. A gang led by John Carradine and Sidney Blackmer break him out of prison, kill some one to convince the authorities Jagger is dead, then hide him behind the scenes at a funfair, where they have him forge things. It soon dawns on Jagger that they're not gangsters looking for someone who can produce fake currency that will pass. They're Nazi spies, trying to inflate the US and neutral countries into bankruptcy, and blow up stuff in the US. Jagger hates being cooped up, and he comes to appreciate freedom in a way he never did before.

It's a production of the King Brothers as they worked they way up from awful movies to ones that look like they have something more to say than "this is a story". I'm not sure if they do, but they certainly give the impression of something more important, with some fine performers, including Mary Brian and Ian Keith, and wild sets that suggest something other than what they show: the blank walls and discarded machinery of the fun fair, the strange, huge metallic shapes of an oil refinery. Releasing, as they did, through Monogram, I'm sure they didn't spend much money, but DP Ira Morgan certainly knew how to shoot things dramatically, and director Harold Young, while never out of the B movies, knew how to let the actor, dialogue, and images carry things along. Perhaps that's the subtext of this story: do your job right, and it will all come out well in the end.

Dean Jagger stars in this wartime cheapie from Monogram as a forger of some reputation. The Gestapo which has set up some American headquarters at an amusement park arranges for Jagger's escape and they even cover up his escape by putting another body on railroad tracks with his ID.

So without the authorities looking for him, Nazi agents John Carradine and Sidney Blackmer set up a print shop where Jagger can counterfeit currency of all kinds for many countries. This is part of a Gestapo diversity program, they do all kinds of dirty work from this headquarters. But Carradine and Blackmer are mostly into sabotage.

Of course Jagger realizes he's a patriotic American at some point and starts sabotaging the saboteurs. I think you know where this is heading.

It is amazing some of the wild stuff that was put into WW2 era films of that era. Especially from the poverty row studios like Monogram.

Claptrap typical of the times.

1943's "I Escaped from the Gestapo" was also issued under the more accurate title "No Escape," as the audience is left to feel just as trapped as Torgut Lane (Dean Jagger), confined in a small, windowless room in the back of a Los Angeles arcade run by Nazi agent Martin (John Carradine). This being a typical Poverty Row production from Monogram, we get a montage of stock footage depicting Lane's well-orchestrated prison break, so that he can use his counterfeiting skills forging bonds and passports on behalf of the Third Reich. Jagger never seems to be too worried about his predicament, and Carradine pretty much gives the same kind of detached performance he usually gave at Monogram ("Revenge of the Zombies," "Return of the Ape Man," "Voodoo Man," "Alaska," "The Face of Marble"). Carradine even lets loose with a mighty yawn in front of Jagger, and neither actor flinched (much). Among the stellar supporting cast we have, in one of her last roles, Mary Brian, best remembered as W. C. Fields' daughter in "Running Wild," "Two Flaming Youths," and "Man on the Flying Trapeze"; Sidney Blackmer and Ian Keith, very adept at playing villains (Carradine even named one of his sons after Keith); Spanky McFarland, at 14 not much taller than one would expect; and one single shot of Frances Farmer, originally cast in the Mary Brian role, who only returned to Hollywood in 1958. John Carradine and Dean Jagger saw a great deal of each other over a span of 32 years: "Brigham Young" (from 1940), "Western Union," "Alaska," "C-Man," "The Proud Rebel," and a memorable confrontation between Carradine's blind preacher and Jagger's bigoted stonemason, Caine's grandfather, in KUNG FU's "Dark Angel" (from 1972).