Verboten!

I enjoyed this for a couple of reasons. The emotional tangle was at times confusing and imperfectly resolved, but the blend of newsreel footage with the film's narrative was often compelling. The other element that I appreciated was the depiction of the Werewolves, the fanatical Nazis who continued the fight after the formal surrender. I don't know of another film that deals with them. They assassinated Burgomaster Oppenhoff of Aachen on Palm Sunday, 1945, for example, and did create problems for the occupation. The film, then, challenges the sanitized version of victory and occupation with some gritty realities. The "human issues" are presented not so much through the characters here, but through the historical reality that was gripping those who had survived Hitler -- both conquered and victors.

"House of Bambou": a man infiltrates into a bunch of former GIs turned criminals.

"Run of the arrow":a confederate ,after the fall of the south ,leaves his people and wants to live with the Indians.

"The naked truth" : a prostitute tries to join the "respectable" world and works with disabled children.

"Shock corridor" : a journalist ,dreaming of a big scoop ,gets admitted in a mental hospital to unmask criminal but is slowly losing his mind....

There are more Fuller movies which deal with the "intruder" subject ,the "hero" who wants to get out of his world ,and "Verboten" is one of them.An American sergeant fights in Germany;a young girl saves his life and he falls for her .The war comes to an end ;not only he wants to marry her ,but he also wants to live in Germany where an embittered youth is dreaming of another "Reich" -a burning subject even today-He has to cope with angry starving Germans who want to get rid of the Americans whose help is humiliating.In spite of unbearable pictures (Nuremberg),the movie is not as convincing as the five movies I mention above .The part of the girl is underwritten and it's difficult to understand her motives.Maybe Fuller wanted her to be an ambiguous figure.

Like this? try this....

"The big lift" George Seaton,1950

One of Fuller's (a combat veteran himself) early works of average quality, but accurately hits on the many conflicting aspects of life in postwar Germany. The main character starts the movie in Apr'45 as a Sgt with C Co, 157th Inf, 45th Div, which really did end the war in Munich as in the movie. (Same unit in the previous month had fought heavily in Aschaffenburg and then liberated part of the Dachau facility). To the uninformed the movie may seem confusing by flip flopping between showing the good & bad of the german people. But anyone who has been there or at least well read on it would know that most of what is portrayed in the movie are things that really did happen in 45-47 Germany. The only inaccuracy I noticed was minor: while on a boat cruise of the Rhine passing the remains of the Remagen bridge he comments he crossed there. But his unit really crossed well south of there - north of Worms Germany.

Samuel Fuller knows war, and is one of the only directors in American movie history who could accurately portray the horrific experiences of it in a form like the motion picture. His pessimism and idealism, if that sounds a little odd to mix together, work for him as a storyteller, and at the same time he's always out to tell the truth, however brutal (or put into melodramatic constructs) it can get. Verboten, however, deals with the post-war experience, as we only get in the opening scenes the big boom of WAR- in bold for a point. The opening shot is like one big exclamation point that seems to continue on into the rest of the scenes: a dead soldier on the ground, the camera pans up, we see another soldier shot down in war-torn terrain. Simple, direct language. Then Fuller punctuates the intensity with something interesting: the title song played over the opening credits as both irony and sincerity, and then Beethoven music over a shoot-out between Americans and the Nazis. Sgt David Brent (James Best) is shot, the battle goes on, and then it transitions to him being treated for his wounds.

It might lead one to believe that this will be a somewhat conventional WW2 flick (somewhat in that one usually wouldn't find Beethoven and, later on to an extent, Wagner put into these images), but this isn't the case. Instead, Fuller makes this a 'Coming Home' kind of movie, though not at all in the sense that 'this soldier comes home injured and so on and so on'. Instead of really going home, Brent stays on in Germany, as he's fallen head over heels for the woman, Helga (Susan Cummings, pretty good at pulling off the German accent), and wants to work in a smaller capacity in the military so he can marry her. What he doesn't realize is that a) she wants him more for money so she can get food for herself and brother, however this gets complex emotionally at the point of revelation to the slightly naive but heartfelt Brent, and b) there's an underground Hitler youth sect called the Werewolves, who want to pick right up off where Hitler ended- starting small, despite argument within the group- by attacking the very government that's now embedded in Germany to give them, as Brent describes, a "blood transfusion."

With this, plus footage from the Nuremburg trials, and (as narrated, I think, by Fuller himself) a quick, no-punches-pulled history of the Nazi war crimes piece by piece, we get a multi-faceted look at a society in the dire straits of an immediate post-war environment. While Rossellini handled it his own way with Germany Year Zero, Fuller tackles it with layers: first there's the love story, or what is the tragic downfall of a man who can't see anything past what he thinks should be reasonable, that it's his wife and a child on the way that he can't leave, until the revelation that he's (partly) been swindled. Baker and Cummings, along with Harold Daye as Helga's young, confused brother, perform at with the utmost detail to emotions; these aren't very easy B-movie parts, though they could've been that. Then another layer is the political one, the struggle of a society to come to grips with being conquered, and a mentality which is made sensationalized, to be sure, by Fuller, in respect to making the Nazi's a total no-gray-area thing: they're evil, particularly when they cancel out reason to meet their ends.

And finally there's the layer of style, which is strangely absorbing. This is probably one of Fuller's 'talkiest' films, which isn't a bad thing considering it's one of his best written scripts, as the characters don't talk simply or in too many platitudes (with the exception of a small scene where two characters talk about the Hitler youth as juvenile delinquents, which is actually, according to Fuller's autobiography, probably another layer to consider in the subtext and the 50s period of movies). And Fuller shoots this almost in a real European style, when he's not going for fight scenes or battles, as the editing isn't always very fast, and sometimes a cut won't happen for a full minute, or longer.

There's an odd tension that grows out of this, especially when there's something said by a character that gets another one wild-eyed or suspicious; Fuller could easily go for a big close-up, but there's a more sinister, cold quality to not moving away from two people in a conversation without a simple over-the-shoulder deal. But when it requires it, like the big brawl outside the American military office, or the Nuremburg footage spliced into Franz's memories of the Werewolves, Fuller can be as stunning stylist as ever.

Very hard to find, but extremely worth it if you'r either a fan of the director's or of WW2 movies set in Germany- or even just a history-buff- Verboten! is an intellectual experience and a strong emotional one, with a cast that is better than expected from a B-movie, and an attitude towards the 'other' that is equally damning and thought provoking.

Great film about an American G.I. who quits the army to marry a German girl who saved his life in the last days of the war. She accepts, but does she do it because she really likes him, or because he can support her with easier access to food and such? Meanwhile, her brother and an old friend form an anti-American terrorist group called the Werewolves, their purpose to drive away the occupants (you might remember the same group playing a major part in Lars von Trier's film Europa (Zentropa)). James Best, best known for his role as Roscoe P. Coltrane in the 1980s television show The Dukes of Hazzard, is shockingly excellent as the American. He should have become a big movie star – at this age he reminds me very much of Warren Beatty. The other main actors are good, as well. Fuller's direction is quite good, using a lot of long takes again (although they are not nearly as complex as they were in Park Row; the long takes more often than not consist of long scenes with a lot of dialogue). The only problems lie in the script, as seems to be the case with all of the Fuller films that I've seen. It's not too badly flawed, but it ought to have been expanded, fleshing out major characters and parts of the script. Helga, the wife, goes through a major change, but completely off screen. Therefore, the emotional center rests squarely on Best's shoulders. Fuller also should have killed off the sick mother early in the film. I hope that doesn't sound too harsh! She just doesn't really do anything throughout the film except lie in bed. She has so few lines. But Fuller keeps bringing her up as the film goes on. I would have had her death solidify David and Helga's relationship myself. And the film ends too abruptly, and it lacks payoff. These aren't really the biggest flaws in the world (the way I described them makes them sound bigger than they are). 9/10.