Watch The Seventh Cross For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

As I watched this rather dull, plodding film with its strange narration I began to have a sense of fright beginning to build up. The work-a-day folks, the villagers and laughing children-very home-like, very much like here. The occasional scenes of brutish Nazi's were not to terrifying as the everyday citizen's acceptance of the new order. The movie portrayed this so well in the almost blank faces of the extras as they witnessed people being taken away and that awful suicide from the rooftop. Watching this film made me realize that-yes-it could happen here. Kudos to those faceless extras that brought home the real atmosphere of such an awful time.

This film stars Spencer Tracy as a concentration camp escapee named George Heisler who navigates his way to freedom through the perils of Nazi Germany. Along the way he meets many people who help him, and his cynicism and fatigue fade away. Early in the story, soon after he's left the camp, he meets a little girl, and in his mind he's sure that he'll kill her if she attracts the wrong kind of attention to him. Next he lurches into the home of his ex-girlfriend, frightening her. And no wonder, because his face has a twisted expression on it that frightened ME - in this moment Tracy is almost unrecognizable. This man's an animal, he's been through hell and he has no reason to believe that the world is anything other than a sewer. For my money this is a pretty startling opening for a 1944 movie.Not to throw definitions around too freely, I'm tempted to describe this film as Nazi noir. Heisler weaves his way through German society of 1936, where it's the criminals who are in power, and scuttling through the streets are the folks who are merely trying to survive, in any way possible. At the back of our minds is the worrisome knowledge that things are going to get exponentially worse. Fred Zinnemann, the director, creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia and palpable dread where the night is filled with dark shadows and any tiny act of resistance to the Nazi regime is a colossal act of courage. There is almost no violence in the film, yet the threat of violence hangs heavy in the air. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy play Paul and Liesel Roeder, a couple who are old friends of Heisler and who befriend him. Paul is politically neutral. He doesn't follow the news, and one gets the feeling that he would rather not know anything about what's going on. One of the fascinating threads in the film is his growing awareness. The scenes with Cronyn and Tandy are wonderful - real chemistry is bubbling here and they seem to belong together (and we all know what happened in real life). I must mention that George Macready and Agnes Moorehead are very good in small roles. There's considerable art and intelligence in "The Seventh Cross", and a preview of what was to come in Zinnemann's illustrious career.

This one caught me by surprise. It seemed rather formulaic at first, straightforward propaganda to inspire the people back home in the last years of WWII. But as it progressed it became much more, a portrait of German society on the eve of the aggression that started it all. Some elements tended to the melodramatic, especially the romance between Tracy and Hasso. I mean come on, they're confessing their love for each other after barely spending a few minutes together? Frankly Tracy has never been a favorite of mine in his earlier roles. He always tended toward the self-righteous, the arrogant, the visionary with no human frailties.The narration from Ray Collins, the first escapee to be caught and killed was also on the corny side. Remember he was the first to die yet he's narrating much of the story. That may have worked in 1944 but today that's pretty dated. There are more effective ways to accomplish the same thing. Moreover the pathos in his voice was also a little over the top.The standout performances here were from Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy as a couple from the working class who are enjoying the benefits of National Socialist largess. Their situation perfectly illustrated how the Nazi social programs kept the German workers happy with subsidies and tax advantages. I'm impressed that a film from 1944 dealt with that in an honest and straightforward manner. In my opinion the standout scene is when the Cronyn returns home after being questioned by the Gestapo and finds Tandy sitting at the table in their apartment. She looks up at him and the look on her face goes from surprise to amazement to joy and then she releases all her pent-up emotions and breaks down in uncontrollable sobs as Cronyn tries to comfort her. What a moving moment and what a treat!

I caught this wonderful little gem on "Spencer Tracy" day on TCM. I love the actor and have seen many of his movies, but I'd never even heard of this one.Other reviewers here have done an excellent job describing the plot. What they haven't mentioned is Tracy's character's emotional flatness at the beginning of the film. Jews in concentration camps described such people as 'Musselmen.' "The musselmen - those who lost the will to live and looked like corpses." from the essay "Women in Forced- Labor Camps" by Felicja Karay from _ Women in the Holocaust._ These were people who had given up: on life, on hope, who were going to die soon. So, yeah, Tracy probably should have been thinner, but this movie takes place in 1938 and Communists got better treatment than Jews, in general, we know now. That losing the will to live is why the narrator in the film says he got him out of the camp when he did.Watching Tracy slowly regain his humanity as friends (like the wonderful Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy) and strangers (like the terrific Agnes Moorehead) help him is very special.It is similar in theme to the very popular relatively new YA novel Markus Zusak's _The Book Thief,_ in that both depict "good" Germans and a Germany where there are some who will do the right thing. Also both show that are some who will not. Both _The Book Thief_ and _The Seventh Cross_ have an interesting narrator- device. Because Tracy's character is so detached at the beginning of the film we need the narrator telling us why we are seeing what we are seeing play across his face. I'd never thought of Tracy as a silent actor, but in this and in _Bad Day at Black Rock,_ he truly is. And a very good one at that.(I wish he and Buter Keaton had been in something besides _It's a Mad etc... World_ together. *That* would have been something!) _The Seventh Cross_ is a very good film. Its subject matter and how it's handled, its acting and storytelling make it so. Check it out!