Because gung-ho WWII movies had largely fallen out of fashion in the late 1950s, Verboten! was instead promoted as a juvenile delinquent film, at a time when leather-clad, marauding youths were the hot-button topic of paranoid parents and low-budget filmmakers alike.
Part love story, part war movie, Verboten! is an angry attack on the complacent mentality that allowed fascism to flourish in 1930s Germany and to continue long after the war had ended. Fuller's cynical view of German denial was not something he had read about in newspapers, but had witnessed first hand. "I did not meet a single German, from the day we invaded Germany to the end of the war in Czechoslovakia, who said he was a Nazi," Fuller told biographer Lee Server, "The one exception was a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl...who told us she was a Nazi and told us to go to hell." Fuller served in the First U.S. Infantry Division during WWII (the legendary "Big Red One") and was part of a military unit that liberated a Nazi concentration camp near Falkenau. Corporal Fuller shot 16mm home movie footage of the camp, and this material later became the centerpiece of the 1988 documentary Falkenau, the Impossible, in which he returns to the site and recounts the experience.
The memory of the death camps was scorched in Fuller's mind and he wanted others to witness the same, lest we forget. When Helga's teenage brother and aspiring Werewolf Franz (Harold Daye) refuses to believe the horror stories of the Third Reich, she takes him to the Nuremberg trials, where he and the audience are subjected to a no-punches-pulled, documentary-style summation of the atrocities committed by the Nazis -- narrated by Fuller himself. Seldom were moviegoers of 1958 subjected to such horrific images, especially woven into the fabric of a traditional war movie. The audacious scene is quintessential Fuller -- a cinematic punch in the gut. "I used the contrasts in shooting to help maintain chaos," Fuller told Server.
Fuller often flirted with contrasting styles in his films, mixing Molotov cocktails of emotion, imagery and messages, none of which were ever administered with much subtlety. Verboten! typifies this reckless approach to filmmaking, a hard-boiled war movie that opens with a syrupy love song ("Verboten!") sung by Paul Anka. Once this ends, the American dogfaces are shown advancing upon a bombed out, sniper-ridden village, their dance of death eerily choreographed to the strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (a favorite piece of Fuller's, which also appears prominently in The Naked Kiss, 1964). Fuller also flavors the film with the grandiose works of Richard Wagner, a composer whose operatic works have come to represent the sweeping power of German legend, even as it reminds us of the anti-Semitism lurking beneath.
At times, Fuller seems to be offering an olive branch to the German people, while at other times, he merely wants to crush those weak-willed sympathizers who allowed the Nazis to take over their country in the first place. In one powerful sequence, Brent becomes fed up with hearing the Germans blaming the Americans for their misfortune, demanding food and medicine from the AMG. "We're not here as liberators!" he shouts at the angry mob, "We're here as conquerors! And don't you forget it!" Immediately thereafter he dives, fists swinging, into the crowd of ungrateful "krauts."
One reason this jumbled and angry film manages to succeed as entertainment is the central performance by Best, who portrays Brent as a hopeful, lovesick, loyal puppy of a sergeant, absolutely dripping with sincerity. When, near the film's climax, he is fired from his government job and begins to suspect that Helga has only married him for his political connections, the painful disillusionment he suffers is heartbreaking, as his boyish idealism crumbles into bitter resentment. Originally, Fuller intended to have Brent shot by military police in the end (after being mistaken for a German), but this conclusion was considered too pessimistic.
Best was a talented character actor who provided Southern color to many a Western and war film during the 1950s and '60s (including the asylum inmate who thinks he's a Confederate General in Fuller's Shock Corridor, 1963). Unfortunately, this delicate character work has been overshadowed by his most famous role, that of the bumbling Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on TV's "The Dukes of Hazzard."
Director/Producer/Screenplay: Samuel Fuller
Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc
Art Direction: John B. Mansbridge
Music: Harry Sukman
Film Editing: Philip Cahn
Cast: James Best (Sgt. David Brent), Susan Cummings (Helga Schiller), Tom Pittman (Bruno Eckart), Harold Daye (Franz Schiller), Joe Turkel (Infantryman), Paul Dubov (Captain Harvey), Steven Geray (Mayor).
BW-87m.
by Bret Wood
