None Shall Escape (André De Toth, 1944)

Playing at Harvard Film Archive on December 8 and 14. — EK

A rare exposé of Nazi atrocities made while the crimes were still ongoing, None Shall Escape is boldly framed as a speculative post-war tribunal that revisits the actions of a German schoolteacher (Alexander Knox) turned Nazi and the horrors he inflicted on a Polish village. Impressed by André De Toth’s Hungarian films, Harry Cohn hired the director after his arrival in the US in 1940. Following a routine B-movie assignment, De Toth—who had personally witnessed and even filmed the Nazi occupation of Poland—was given None Shall Escape; its title echoing President Roosevelt’s pledge of postwar justice.

Leftist screenwriter Lester Cole adapted a story by Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than, two recently-arrived refugees. For a rabbi’s speech delivered before Jews are boarded onto trains bound for a concentration camp, Cole drew on the words of Dolores Ibárruri, the Spanish Republican and communist icon. After the war, many involved with the film—including actress Marsha Hunt, producer Sidney Buchman, and both Cole and Knox—were blacklisted. If “visionary” means imagining the future through the past, this staggering work is one of the most visionary films in the history of American cinema.