The Seventh Cross (1944)
(On Cable TV, December 2020) There are a few good reasons to watch The Seventh Cross – It’s an early film from Academy-award-winning director Fred Zinnemann, it features Spencer Tracy and it’s the first on-screen pairing of real-life couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy (the last being 1987 science fiction family comedy Batteries Not Included). More significantly, it’s one of the very few Hollywood films to talk about Nazi concentration camps as WW2 was going on, and before the true horrors of the camps were revealed. The story has to do with seven escapees from a concentration camp trying to evade capture, despite a commandant determined to bring them all back (“on crosses,” hence the title). Our protagonist (Tracy) is the seventh, the last escapee trying to get out of Germany despite a population not sympathetic to his goals. The premise is not bad, the acting talent is remarkable, the director would go on for better things and the script has a few flourishes (notably in having the narrator being one of the first dead escapees), but I found The Seventh Cross to be surprisingly uninvolving once past the first few minutes. This may be a reflection of a contemporary view of the situation: escaping Nazis would seem, today, to be of utter urgency, leading to a suspenseful film – but it seems more intent on an examination of the human spirit than out-and-out thrills. Whatever the reason, The Seventh Cross seems more interesting than purely enjoyable or entertaining today.