I caught this wonderful little gem on "Spencer Tracy" day on TCM. I love the actor and have seen many of his movies, but I'd never even heard of this one.
Other reviewers here have done an excellent job describing the plot. What they haven't mentioned is Tracy's character's emotional flatness at the beginning of the film. Jews in concentration camps described such people as 'Musselmen.' "The musselmen - those who lost the will to live and looked like corpses." from the essay "Women in Forced- Labor Camps" by Felicja Karay from _ Women in the Holocaust._ These were people who had given up: on life, on hope, who were going to die soon. So, yeah, Tracy probably should have been thinner, but this movie takes place in 1938 and Communists got better treatment than Jews, in general, we know now. That losing the will to live is why the narrator in the film says he got him out of the camp when he did.
Watching Tracy slowly regain his humanity as friends (like the wonderful Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy) and strangers (like the terrific Agnes Moorehead) help him is very special.
It is similar in theme to the very popular relatively new YA novel Markus Zusak's _The Book Thief,_ in that both depict "good" Germans and a Germany where there are some who will do the right thing. Also both show that are some who will not. Both _The Book Thief_ and _The Seventh Cross_ have an interesting narrator- device. Because Tracy's character is so detached at the beginning of the film we need the narrator telling us why we are seeing what we are seeing play across his face. I'd never thought of Tracy as a silent actor, but in this and in _Bad Day at Black Rock,_ he truly is. And a very good one at that.
(I wish he and Buter Keaton had been in something besides _It's a Mad etc... World_ together. *That* would have been something!)
_The Seventh Cross_ is a very good film. Its subject matter and how it's handled, its acting and storytelling make it so. Check it out!
Other reviewers here have done an excellent job describing the plot. What they haven't mentioned is Tracy's character's emotional flatness at the beginning of the film. Jews in concentration camps described such people as 'Musselmen.' "The musselmen - those who lost the will to live and looked like corpses." from the essay "Women in Forced- Labor Camps" by Felicja Karay from _ Women in the Holocaust._ These were people who had given up: on life, on hope, who were going to die soon. So, yeah, Tracy probably should have been thinner, but this movie takes place in 1938 and Communists got better treatment than Jews, in general, we know now. That losing the will to live is why the narrator in the film says he got him out of the camp when he did.
Watching Tracy slowly regain his humanity as friends (like the wonderful Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy) and strangers (like the terrific Agnes Moorehead) help him is very special.
It is similar in theme to the very popular relatively new YA novel Markus Zusak's _The Book Thief,_ in that both depict "good" Germans and a Germany where there are some who will do the right thing. Also both show that are some who will not. Both _The Book Thief_ and _The Seventh Cross_ have an interesting narrator- device. Because Tracy's character is so detached at the beginning of the film we need the narrator telling us why we are seeing what we are seeing play across his face. I'd never thought of Tracy as a silent actor, but in this and in _Bad Day at Black Rock,_ he truly is. And a very good one at that.
(I wish he and Buter Keaton had been in something besides _It's a Mad etc... World_ together. *That* would have been something!)
_The Seventh Cross_ is a very good film. Its subject matter and how it's handled, its acting and storytelling make it so. Check it out!