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I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Producer: Lazar Wechsler. Copyright 31 March 1948 by Loew's International Corp. Preliminary copyright applied for by Loew's, Inc. A production of Praesens-Film, Zurich, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. New York opening at the Victoria: 23 March 1948. U.S. release: 6 August 1948. U.K. release: 1 May 1950. Australian release: 17 March 1949. 9,450 feet. 105 minutes. NOTES: Partly photographed in the U.S. Occupied Zone of Germany, through the courtesy of the U.S. Army and the I.R.O Only film of child actor Ivan Jandl, who received a special Hollywood award for "the outstanding juvenile performance of 1948". Number 3 on the National Board of Review's list of the Ten Best Films of 1948. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times also selected The Search as one of his Ten Best Films of the year. The movie took excellent money on domestic release, but failed to ignite the British box-office. In the rest of Europe, however, The Search chalked up such huge receipts, it topped the list of M-G-M's most commercially successful releases of the year. Australia followed the British pattern. Despite super-enthusiastic reviews, the movie took only fair money in the cultural centers of Sydney and Melbourne, with absolutely dismal takings elsewhere - even in Brisbane, the so-called "home of M-G-M". COMMENT: This film, made in its entirety in Europe in 1947, presents a number of parallels with another Zinnemann film, The Men (1950): both deal with the after-effects of war; both are virtually documentaries, with fictional elements added; and both use professional and non-professional actors very effectively. The Search tells the story of a little boy, Karel Malik, who has been separated from his family in a concentration camp. Now that the war is over, the United Nations is trying to restore these thousands of displaced children to their parents. But Karel's experiences have left such a mark on him that he has forgotten everything about his earlier life, including his name and nationality. The UNO authorities decide to transfer him to a welfare camp, but en route Karel escapes and wanders around the rubble of Berlin. At the same time, Mrs Malik is going from one bureau to another seeking information on Karel, the only member of the family who may still be alive. Despite discouragements and failures, she finally arrives at the camp from which Karel has escaped. The film was shot on location among the ruins and rubble of Germany, and in the offices and depots of UNO. The actual direction, however, is characterized by Zinnemann's attractive sensibility, his quick feeling for moods and situations and unobtrusive use of natural backgrounds. The first reel is somewhat marred by a sentimental commentary, which Zinnemann says was included at the insistence of the producers; he wanted to remove it, but was unable to do so. As a whole, the film brings home very forcefully the full horror of war; but there are two individual scenes which stay long in the mind. The first is the sequence in which the children are being given their preliminary interviews: children of 7-10, in all the languages of Europe, tell unemotionally of gas ovens and tortures. The second occurs when the children are ready to be taken to UN welfare camps. They are about to be put into trucks bearing Red Cross symbols; they refuse to enter, remembering that the Nazis took people to gas chambers in such vans. When they are at last persuaded to enter and the trucks move off, stray fumes from the exhaust penetrate the back compartment, and the children panic. Nothing is seen but their faces full of fear, and their hands clawing to break down the doors. These two scenes render the atmosphere of war-time Europe in a way that a thousand books and lectures could never do. The professional actors underplay with quiet assurance, and help invest the film with its air of actuality. Aline MacMahon is admirable as the harassed UN welfare officer, humane and realistic, trying to cope with the task of mending broken lives; Montgomery Clift, in his first screen appearance, acts with likeable charm; and young Ivan Jandl (as Karel Malik), despite the fact that his voice is dubbed by an English-speaking child, plays naturally and unaffectedly. The material of The Search is grim, yet it assiduously avoids moralizing of the Divided Heart school. There are no messages, no hopeful prophecies for the future, simply a straightforward reportage on the European tragedy. For this movie, Zinnemann won the first Screen Directors Guild Award.

During the beginning of this film (or at least it was about an hour in, I think, Lincoln gets elected and the background music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That wasn't written yet - or at least not published.In November of 1861, Julia Ward Howe penned it after touring some Union camps. The soldiers were singing the tune, but with words from John Brown's Body...She wrote it as if awakening from a dream, and immediately wrote down the entire verses - and then it was published on the front page of the Atlantic Monthly in February of 1862. So....maybe the music was from the Union camps? I don't think so - someone simply didn't do their research.

Having fled a refugee centre in post-World War II Germany, a traumatised boy with selective mutism is taken in by a kindly soldier while his mother desperately searches for him in this war drama starring Montgomery Clift as the soldier. 'The Search' was Clift's first big screen performance and he is great every step of the way, radiating genuine excitement when teaching the boy how to speak and the bond that develops between them is undeniable. Jarmila Novotna is also fine as the boy's mother, never once lapsing into melodrama in a nicely down-to-earth turn, and Ivan Jandl as the boy in question won a special Oscar for his performance. The film takes quite a while to warm up with Clift not making an appearance until over 30 minutes in. The beginning portion of the film also features a lot of sentimental voice-over narration that spells out the obvious (the kids are described as "children who had a right to better things"). There are, however, also several fantastic moments early on. The bumpy, silent ambulance ride in which tension and anxiety within the kids gradually swells up rates as one of the finest sequences that director Fred Zinnemann ever filmed - and the subsequent near-silent chase scene is equally as intense. Whatever the case, the final hour or so of the film (in which the narration practically disappears) is excellent stuff. Clift's altruism is especially resonating as the film looks at the ability of humanity to triumph in the face of the inhumanities of war, and the use of actual desolate postwar German locations injects a chilling sense of authenticity into the air.

This is a genuine overlooked gem, portraying the desolation of post-World War II Europe, and the hopelessness of hundreds of thousands of displaced child refugees with lost or dead parents, no place to go and nothing to eat. Some aspects of the plot and dialog are dated, but the story and the craftsmanship make the movie timeless. This was Montgomery Clift's second movie and he did an excellent job, both starring in it (for which he received an Academy Award nomination), and apparently in rewriting the original script substantially (the movie also was nominated for best screenplay, and won for best story, both in the names of the credited screenwriters). The entire cast, American and European, did an excellent job, and the use of bombed and destroyed German cities as backgrounds gave The Search a sense of reality and urgency that can be almost jarring and startling. Despite the bleak sounding summary of the plot, the movie is inspiring, witty and entertaining, and no downer.