It's been slow going getting through this admittedly long list but here's another one.
This was a really interesting WW2 film about espionage in the waning days of the war in Europe that provides a a bridge, stylistically at least, between the older war/spy genres and the Cold War hard-edged movies that would follow. The show opens with what would have been at the time, a fairly conventional setup with German POWs and their American captors who need intelligence on the German military what has not yet been defeated. You almost expect the movie to lead in a "Dirty Dozen" direction with the commander putting together a team of German prisoners willing to basically betray their own nation but the focus becomes one of the Germans' motivations.
The movie is a little slow to get going with narration doing some of the heavy lifting exposition work but once the scene changes to German soil, the movie gets a lot more interesting. The scenes where the team goes behind enemy lines, which were actually filmed in German cities, look very real with a quality you don't usually see in WW2 movies of that era. The main focus of the movie really is Oskar Werner's young German medic who completely overshadows the top billed star, Richard Basehart. I find Werner, who was really underused in his overall career, great in anything I've seen him in. This was his First American film.
By modern standards, this film is a mixed bag. The voice overs seem creaky now and the Germans, who were as far as I can tell, really Germans (not Brits playing Nazis as a lot of other movies seemed to do) all speak English, even when the scenes are ostensibly in Germany. However, it's unrealistic to expect a Hollywood production to have extended scenes with subtitles in 1951. However, the photography and editing pace, combined with the realism of the bombed-out locations in Germany, make the movie look ahead of its time.
I'll be revisiting this one for sure.
