I happened accidentally upon DER FUCHS VON PARIS, spoken in German and with subtitles. The plot emerges clearly from the outset, turning around the nobility of a few senior Deutsche Wehrmacht officers in the occupied French capital who can see the madness of the plans coming from Berlin as the inevitability of an Allied invasion looms ever larger.
Martin Held delivers a commanding performance as General Quade (his surname sounds more British than Teutonic, which should have raised some red flags in the highly suspicious Gestapo right up to the top ranks, Adolf included - but apparently did not. Bad mistake, Adolf!)
Quade does not want to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of German soldiers on the Wehrmacht's defense lines along the vast French cast, so he decides to pass the actual plans from Berlin to the enemy.
And the messenger is none other than his nephew, the young Hardy Kruger, a Wehrmacht captain fresh from an icy time in Russia and looking forward to some fun in the City of Light, where he promtply saves a child from drowning in the River Seine. And how convenient that proves to Marianne Koch, playing a young French Resistance woman - although she does not use a single French word throughout.
Apart from some well taken shots of Paris from the gargoyles of Notre Dame, Montmartre and other Parisian landmarks, this film does not feel much like taking place in France. The whole drama is about the error of following the Berlin plan and how noble Quade sends his nephew to his death - with the undeserved reputation of traitor to boot - and ultimately takes his own life, when he sees that his nephew cannot be spared.
On the plus side, in doing so Quade managed to leave this world giving the impression that his nephew's betrayal had very nobly prompted his suicide.
Clearly, DER FUCHS is an antiwar film that depicts the irony of a most unfortunate sequence of events that blight the love beginning to blossom between a pure French girl and a pure German boy, she of the French Resistance, he of the Wehrmacht.
Can anyone think of purer souls?
The script, conveniently designed to convince the spectator of the well-meaning nature of most Germans under Adolf's jackboot, has some fine moments and dialogue.
Excellent cinematography by Georg Bruckbauer, the film's best asset in my view. 7/10.
