Tue 6 Feb 2018
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: VERBOTEN! (1959).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[11] Comments
VERBOTEN! RKO Radio Pictures, 1958/Columbia Pictures, 1959. James Best, Susan Cummings, Tom Pittman, Paul Dubov. Screenwriter-director: Samuel Fuller.
Highly uneven and overly didactic, Samuel Fuller’s Verboten! is a quirky, stagey film about an American GI in Occupied Germany at the end of the Second World War. After he loses two of his colleagues and he himself gets injured in combat, Sergeant David Brent (James Best) finds himself the houseguest of an anti-Nazi German girl (Susan Cummings) who nurses him back to health. To no one’s surprise — certainly not to this viewer — Brent falls in love with his German companion. But since marriage and fraternization between the two is forbidden — verboten! — Brent decides to leave the Army and to serve in the civilian occupation of Germany.
Little does he know that his wife’s friend Bruno Eckhart (Tom Pittman) and her younger brother are both secretly working with the Werwolf, the underground pro-Nazi “resistance.†Much of the movie is filled with heavy-handed dialogue about the difference between ordinary Germans and Nazis and the ways in which Hitler manipulated the German people into following him.
Some of this is effective; a lot of it is over the top and actually serves to take away from the potency of the subject manner. There is, however, a stunningly effective sequence in which Eckhart attempts to rally a coterie of young, angry men to the Nazi cause in the rubble of occupied Germany. Pittman, who was a compelling screen presence, tragically died in a car crash in late 1958 at the young age of 26 several months before Verboten! was released in theaters.
Fuller, always a maverick, utilizes Beethoven when showing the Americans in combat and Wagner for the Germans. That aesthetic choice, along with the choice to insert highly graphic newsreel footage from the concentration camps in the film, has the unusual effect of giving the entire movie a semi-documentary feel in which fiction and fact are intertwined in a decidedly ambitious, but ultimately mediocre war film. Verboten! is a movie wants to say a lot, to shout it from the rooftops, but does so in such a frenetic manner that the message gets drowned out by its own unfortunate shrillness.
February 6th, 2018 at 10:47 pm
Not one of Fuller’s finer cinematic moments. It is strident when it should be subtle, subtle when it should be outspoken,and more tiresome than dramatic.
A better film would have dealt with how the silence of good Germans was as devastating as the true believers.
February 7th, 2018 at 1:10 am
On Facebook, the Leo Gordon site run by Leo’s daughter has a piece on Tom Pittman’s short life.
February 7th, 2018 at 9:04 am
I haven’t seen this so I’ll try not to comment on it. Fuller had moments of sheer subversive genius, but he could be terribly stodgy too.
February 7th, 2018 at 10:51 pm
Is this the only movie in which James Best has a starring role?
February 7th, 2018 at 11:49 pm
Steve, there are at least two more. Killer Shrews and its sequel.
February 8th, 2018 at 12:12 am
Thanks, Barry. I’ll pass on both, though. You’d have to pay me to watch anything with a title like that. And I don’t come cheap!
February 8th, 2018 at 12:30 am
Fuller, being Fuller, is trying to have it both ways here, adhere to the post war narrative that the majority of Germans were innocents misled by Nazi thugs, and exploit the ever popular Nazi bad guy theme with a bit of fifties style juvie fiction German style thrown in … NAZI WITHOUT A CAUSE or I WAS A TEENAGED WAFFEN SS WEREWOLF.
The Holocaust footage in what feels more like an exploitation flick than a serious drama is jarring, and while the performances run from earnest to good ‘mediocre” is the best and kindest thing I could say about it.
Fuller overreaches here, never seems sure exactly what he wants to say, and is neither bad enough to watch for fun nor good enough to watch for entertainment.
Steve,
Aside from his more famous roles I always recall Best in that TWILIGHT ZONE episode where he is the backwoodsman who marries the witch.
February 8th, 2018 at 2:46 am
James Best sidebar (sort of):
– You really never saw Killer Shrews?
With its “all-star” cast – not only Best, but also Ken “Festus” Curtis (who also produced), Greta Thyssen (who did this to get out of a dead-end Columbia contract), Baruch Lumet (Sidney Lumet’s father, a long way from New York’s Yiddish theater), and my fave, Gordon McLendon (creator of Top-40 radio, creator of all-news radio, maestro of re-creation baseball on the Liberty Radio Network – and the guy who put up the money for the picture)?
– Actually, what I recall James Best from is a Jerry Lewis comedy from 1966 called Three On A Couch.
His billing in this reads:
Introducing James Best
– which might seem strange, since Best had been very visible on both big and small screens for about a decade.
I recall that when Jerry was plugging this one on talk shows, he made a big deal about how James Best was his “discovery”, who was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so forth … except that it didn’t quite happen (Lewis’s box-office decline was well underway at that point).
That’s Hollywood!
February 9th, 2018 at 5:30 am
Random trivia about Baruch Lemet: one of his students (he taught theater) was Tobe Hooper who went on to make THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
December 5th, 2018 at 9:47 am
Is this the only movie in which James Best has a starring role?
December 5th, 2018 at 1:38 pm
From Wikipedia:
“He also starred in the science fiction cult movie, The Killer Shrews (1959) and its sequel, Return of the Killer Shrews (2012).”
There may be others.