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Father Warecki (Henry Travers) confronts Wilhelm Grimm (Alexander Knox) as his soldiers are about to round up the Jews of the village.

The evil that men do is on full display in a Criterion Channel collection called Noir and the Blacklist.

Evil in its various forms – fascism, racism, anti-semitism, narcissism, etc. – is featured in the 15- film collection. The title refers to noir genre films that were created by or with the assistance of someone later blacklisted in Hollywood due to aspersions being cast on their political sympathies, particularly if they leaned so far left that they might have brushed shoulders with card-carrying commies somewhere along the path of life. Some might even have been card-carrying commies themselves. Big deal!

And somewhere along the way after that post-World War II period when communists were the current political bugaboo – as immigrants are today – the practice of blacklisting anyone with suspected communist tendencies came to be known as McCarthyism, after drunken Senator Joseph McCarthy from Grand Chute, Wis. His name remains infamous for all the ruined careers and lives during those dark days, but he had nothing to do with the purge of Hollywood. That began before he was even elected to the Senate in 1947. 

It was the House UnAmerican Activities Committee – HUAC – led by an evil little turd Republican Congressman who went by the name of J. Parnell Roberts that started the Red Scare, focusing attention in ridding Hollywood of commies and subversives.

Parnell and his committee ordered 10 suspected commie/commie sympathizers/subversives to testify before them. When each refused to answer Parnell’s big question – “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” – they were cited with contempt of Congress, fined $1,000 each and sent to prison for a one-year max. The 10 were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo.

In an ironic twist for Congressman Roberts, when he was found guilty of fraud and sent to prison for 18 months, he did his time (paroled after eight months) in the same prison where both Ring Lardner Jr. and Lester Cole were doing time on the contempt charge.

And it’s a Lester Cole movie that was first to catch my eye among the Noir and the Blacklist collection, the 1943 release None Shall Escape. It’s a powerful tale that predicts Germany’s loss in World War II and anticipates the Nuremburg Trials, with the story of how a mild-mannered school teacher became a rabid Nazi through flashbacks from witnesses telling his life story in a world court after the war.

Making it even more prescient, it was filmed and edited from Aug. 31 to Oct. 26, 1943 – more than half a year before D-Day turned the tide of the European portion of the war.

Lester Cole wrote the screenplay, which is credited with being the first film to show how Nazis were treating Jews, and the brutality is shown with uncompromising honesty that you don’t often see in 80-year-old movies.

None Shall Escape is one of more than 40 movies Cole wrote between 1932 and 1947, when he ran into the clutches of J. Parnell Roberts. After he did his prison time, Cole remained blacklisted. Before his death in 1985, he was able to have three more films made from his work, but under pseudonyms, the best known of which is the 1966 story of Elsa the lion, Born Free – screenplay by Gerald L. C. Copley (hmmm, wonder what L.C. stood for?).

None Shall Escape stars Alexander Knox, in his screen debut, as the villainous Nazi Wilhelm Grimm. While not blacklisted, Knox found himself under scrutiny for his liberal views and for joining fellow Hollywood actors, writers and directors such as John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, Edward G. Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx and many more in the Committee for the First Amendment, formed in 1947 in opposition to HUAC and its treatment of the Hollywood 10. So Knox, a Canadian, moved to England to continue his career without having to deal with filthy American politics.

As I was watching Wilhelm Grimm’s descent into the evil ways of fascism and listening to the naive responses of regular folk as the Nazi menace grew, I could not help thinking about how quickly this country has devolved with Trump and his MAGA clowns at the helm. 

At one point Grimm reminds of creepy First Lady Elon Musk and his quote about empathy: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Grimm just phrases it differently, after his former fiance Marja (Marsha Hunt) tells him he has no pity – “Human feeling is a luxury that vital nations can’t afford. Human feeling is the last resort of decadence.”

The story of Grimm’s rise through Nazi ranks to become reich commissioner of the western region of Poland is told in flashback by various witnesses testifying in the world court, including Grimm’s brother Karl, who worked as an editorial writer for a socialist newspaper. Grimm personally arrested his own brother and had him thrown into a concentration camp to be indoctrinated. 

“He’s sick.  He must be made well again,” Grimm tells Karl’s family as jackbooted thugs haul Karl away.
It is Karl’s testimony that reminds of current times:

“He was my brother. I loved him more than I hated his politics,” Karl tells the court. “He was rising up to a positon of influence in the Nazi party and all he could hear was the din of noisy promises, made by his party leaders, which the decent, intelligent people of Germany were not taking seriously. So that by the time they awakened to what was happening, it was 1933 (the year Hitler was appointed chancellor and began the consolidation of power that led to World War II).”

Grimm’s story parallels that of Adolf Schickelgruber, aka Hitler – injured World War I veteran, unhappy with the way Germany was treated and run after the war. He is involved in the 1924 beer hall putsch and is sent to the Landsberg Prison, where Hitler is writing Mein Kampf in the cell above Grimm.

The story begins through the eyes of Father Warecki (Henry Travers), the village priest in Litzbark, Poland.

It’s the spring of 1919, following the end of the first world war.

“The scars of war were there on the hearts and faces of women and children for the men who would never return,” he says.

The priest is in the village square, where he meets the local rabbi (familiar character actor Richard Hale in his first screen role). They come upon a discussion where a villager (character actor Ray Teal) says “Poland for the Poles.”

“Can’t you see how the Versailles Treaty will protect Poland?” says Dr. Matek, mayor of Litzbark.

“What about the Germans?” the villager says.

“You blockhead,” the mayor answers, “German imperialism has been defeated forever.”

At that line we get our first look at “our German teacher Wilhelm Grimm.”

He returns bitter, wounded and walking on a prosthetic leg.

He intends to rekindle a romantic relationship with Marja, who he says is the only human being that he loves.

“The others, I hate all of them. Not just the Poles but Germans too. They lost the war. The future lies in victory, not freedom.”

Disturbed by his newfound Aryan weirdness, she asks to “postpone” their marriage, and goes away to Warsaw to care for the priest’s ill sister, but returns after three months determined to keep her promise and marry Wilhelm. As the priest explains, “She felt now more than ever Wilhelm needed her love and care.”

She arrives back in her village the same day one of her former students is accused of sexually assaulting a classmate, a girl named Anna. 

Anna, however, is not speaking, “like one stricken dumb.”

Marja finds Anna and tells her the villagers believe her classmate Jan hurt her. Anna says it wasn’t Jan, and then wonders, “Why didn’t he kill me. I begged him to kill me.” She says “he” could have used one of his silver guns to kill her. Anna realizes that Wilhelm owns a pair of silver pistols and guesses correctly that it was he who violated the girl.

As Marja rides her bike to confront Wilhelm, Anna runs to the river and drowns herself. 

The next scene reminds me of a similar scene in the 1931 Frankenstein, when a villager carries the body of his girl into the village after she has been drowned by the monster. In None Shall Escape, But the aforementioned villager played by Ray Teal, who is Anna’s father, carryies her limp body into the public square as Wilhelm skulks behind a column, watching the scene.

The village learns Wilhelm drove the girl to suicide. A crowd gathers and the formerly accused Jan throws a rock that puts out Wilhelm’s eye. After rasking for and receiving money from the priest and rabbi, Wilhelm escapes to Germany and hooks up with the Hitler crowd.

One of the most shocking scenes in a movie of this period is when the Nazis round up the Jews of the village and load them like cattle on to railroad boxcars – just as they were actually doing.

Rabbi Levin (Richard Hale again) has a potent scene as he speaks:“My people! Be calm. Listen to me. Let’s prepare ourselves to face the supreme moment in our lives. This is our last chance. It doesn’t matter if it’s long or short. For centuries we have sought only peace. We have submitted to many degradations believing that we will achieve justice, for a reason. We have tried to take our place honestly and decently alongside all mankind to help make a better world, a world in which all men would live as free neighbors. We had hoped, and prayed. But now we see that hope was not enough. What good has it done to submit? Submission brought us rare moments in history when we were tolerated.

“Tolerated! Is there any greater degradation than to be tolerated? To be permitted to exist? We have submitted too long. If we want equality and justice we must take our place alongside all other oppressed peoples, regardless of race or religion. Their fight is ours. Ours is theirs.”

The actor pauses a beat before saying, “We haven’t much time left. By our actions we will be remembered. This is our last free choice. Our moment in history. And I say to you let us choose to fight! Here! Now!”

But their fists are no match for Nazi machine guns.

After hearing all the testimony, Grimm gets his chance to speak, but he continues to spout Nazi propaganda. There is no hope for the lost.

If you feel like a double feature from Noir and the Blacklist, Crossfire from 1947 pairs well. It stars three Roberts (Ryan, Mitchum and Young) and tells the post-war tale of a murder mystery involving several soldiers waiting to be demobilized and a kind Jewish man who is beaten to death by one of them. It’s a taut and well-told tale that involved two Hollywood 10 blacklistees – producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dymtryk.

The movie is from a 1945 novel by Richard Brooks called The Brick Foxhole, however the victim in Brooks’ novel was beaten to death because he was a homosexual, not because he was Jewish.
Hollywood at that time did not allow homosexuals to exist, but it could not deny that Jews existed.