Escape!

'Escape' is the name of a film made when I was only seven so I doubt I saw it. It starred Robert Taylor and Norma Shearer and, of course, was a black and white. It was a film about the Nazis prior to the Americans entering the war. An American goes over to Germany to find out what happened to his mother. She had been an actress in Germany, had then moved to America and while there befriended German refugees. However, the Germans considered them traitors and therefore she was a traitor to them and so when she came back to Germany to sell her house they arrested her and were holding her in a concentration camp. They planned on executing her.

It was a well done movie and very suspenseful. I had to look ahead to see if there was a happy ending. I have watched too many sad endings lately and movies about Nazis and there terrible brutality have always frightened me. During WWII we always saw news movies about the war shown before the regular movie. They showed pictures of the Nazis doing the goosestep and told terrible things bout them. I would have nightmres about them coming over the Canadian border and coming to Glendive.

The thing that was especially interesting though is that the way the mother was saved was the same way Valentine was saved in 'The Count of Monte Cristo'. They were both given some kind of drug which put them in a coma and they were thought to be dead and put in a casket. As soon as possible they were removed from the casket (in another location) and kept warm until they revived. (They didn't do all the things they do to dead people now obviously). Anyway I had never heard of this kind of a trick and to read about it and see it in a movie a day later was especially intriguing.

This is what was printed about the movie in 1940 when it was made.

"Propaganda? Well, of course—if you choose to label a picture which tells a documented story with that word. But this film is something more than a shocking, repulsive account of brutality and inhumanity directed against helpless beings. Rather it is a story of courageous opposition to a system which attempts to crush the freedom of mankind, a vivid and inspiring tale of a small but significant cooperative effort to defeat the forces of oppression. In the course of it, more than one regimented victim breaks his bonds, even though, in the end, only one unfortunate goes free. The conclusion is victory, not defeat."

Yes, I watch a lot of movies!