Majestic trees are beautiful plane trees. Once upon a time, they delighted, inspired, supported life and were its personification. Why all this in a concentration camp? Anything that can make you feel human again is harmful and highly undesirable in this place. To warm the briefly cooled walls of the barracks and to serve as a place of public torture of the guilty (with a cross board nailed for this purpose, the tree became frighteningly similar to a cross) - that is all their simple functions. Therefore, when in the autumn of one thousand nine hundred and thirty-six seven prisoners escaped from the camp at once, the enraged commandant ordered to make "crosses" for each of the fugitives.
The anti-fascist novel by German writer Anna Segers was published in the midst of World War II. They were immediately interested in Hollywood. And not only because the local producers always keep on pencil the acclaimed works in the world of literature, but also because of the current problems of the book, and perhaps also because of the large number of directors who emigrated from Germany and Austria, who became an obvious strengthening of the creative staff of the United States - for them this story about ordinary people caught off guard by the millstones of history, but who did not lose a human face was especially relevant. Fred Zinneman, who took up the production, rightly reasoned that it is not even worth trying to shove the Zegers novel, with its panoramic structure and an abundance of full-blooded characters, into two hours of screen time. We are in many ways an independent version of the story of Georg Geisler and other prisoners, and the focus is not on a detailed portrait of a particular people at a certain stage of its existence, but on universal questions with a low “currency rate”: the more terrible times, the higher the value of answers to them. The prisoners who fled were not foreigners (though, God sees, they have already become strangers in this country) for whom it would be a salvation to reach their own. Who knows where those guys are now? He who yesterday was a colleague, a friend, even a relative may well find himself on the other side of the barricades today, and he does not need to be a burnt-out National Socialist. To expose the dangers of relatives and friends in order to save one person, to sacrifice one’s own life for the very illusory good of the whole humanity – not everyone will do this, frankly speaking. Paralyzing fear is the main weapon of the totalitarian regime, and therefore the capture of fugitives was a matter of time. And with each cross filled, the rest of the captives, who were mentally with their escaped comrades, lost the last remnant of suddenly renewed hope. Almost lost faith in humanity and the main character of the story, George. Desperate, he continued to search for ways of salvation rather under the influence of the animal instinct of self-preservation, not entertaining himself with the idea that there would be people ready to help him, regardless of the mortal danger that threatened them. George was wrong ...
Before the two-time winner of the American Academy Award Spencer Tracy was a difficult task to portray his hero, using a minimum of expressive means: most of the screen time, the character of Tracy is alone with himself, and in the company of people he has little talk. Playing mostly with one eye, the actor brilliantly coped with the role. Also excellent was the image of Paul Raeder, an old friend of George. Hume Cronin, who played him, simply dissolved in his role, breathing life into an unusually accurately transferred type from the source. Largely due to his natural play, a lump comes to the throat when in one of the scenes, George, responding to a warning that people were breaking and better than Paul Raeder, with unshakeable confidence in his voice, cut off: “There are no people better than Paul Raeder.” In general, Zinneman relies primarily on the texture of actors and a strict sequence of scenario events, often to the detriment of poetic-shaped presentation of material. And what a fertile ground for that. Even Karl Freund, who has been trained in working with venerable expressionists, the operator of the tape here operates more with standard visual solutions, somewhat not pressing on the expressive power of such a reliable and proven tool as the play of light and shadow (in the Internet, by the way, a colored version of the picture walks, but it is better to stay away from it). The film did not escape the classic drawback of many screen versions, namely a very uneven selection of scenes worthy of transfer to the screen and vice versa. So, not included in the film a magnificent episode in which George found a place to sleep, using the services of the first lady of easy behavior, it was easy to replace a very long scene of visiting a theater dressmaker. These, of course, are nitpicking, the more successful original finds from Zinneman are enough: the moment in which George is mistaken for a pocket thief, for example.
In general, despite some shortcomings caused largely by inflated expectations and the inevitable comparison of the film with the book, before us, of course, a very worthy example of classic Hollywood drama. No roughness of adaptation can spoil the impression of the powerful humanistic message inherent in the original idea. And what was conceived as a demonstration of the total subjugation and oppression of the human person suddenly turned into proof of the fact that even in the darkest times there is room in human hearts for self-sacrifice and faith in the highest justice.