For his third feature film Fred Zinnemann scored big with a grim story of Nazi terror that finally took note of the Concentration Camps, if not the full immensity of their horror. Spencer Tracy’s everyman fugitive one of seven escapees, and the people he meets and things he sees would send any war industry worker back to the assembly line determined to work harder. The movie is artful, even elegant, and it doesn’t trivialize its subject. The ensemble cast includes Signe Hasso, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Agnes Moorehead, Herbert Rudley, George Macready and Kaaren Verne.

The Seventh Cross
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1944 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 111 min. / Street Date August 4, 2026 / Available at MovieZyng / 24.98
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Signe Hasso, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Agnes Moorehead, Herbert Rudley, Felix Bressart, Ray Collins, Alexander Granach, Katherine Locke, George Macready, Steven Geray, Kaaren Verne, Konstantin Shayne, George Suzanne, John Wengraf, George Zucco, Robert Blake, Ludwig Donath, Charles McGraw, Gigi Perreau.
Cinematography: Karl Freund
Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons, Leonid Vasian
Film Editor: Thomas Richards
Music Composer: Roy Webb
Second Unit Director: Andrew Marton
Screenplay by Helen Deutsch from the novel by Anna Seghers
Produced by Pandro S. Berman
Directed by Fred Zinnemann

The facts about concentration camps weren’t public knowledge during the war, and few movie depictions came anywhere near the truth.Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hollywood was uncertain how to characterize the war in Europe. The confusion led to some fairly embarrassing movies when the subject of Hitler’s concentration camps came up. Clark Gable, John Wayne and others starred in films about reporters escaping from detention or carrying messages from the camps, often inadvertently downplaying conditions inside. Although activists had been giving accurate reports on these camps since their establishment not long after Hitler took power, much of America chose to look the other way: Germany was an important trade partner. Only after Austria was annexed did the studios begin producing anti-Nazi films, very carefully. The almost unique independent production  So Ends Our Night, an excellent drama about the plight of political refugees pushed from one country to another as German influence advances, was reviewed with respect. But did not become a major hit.

 

Made in 1944, MGM’s adaptation of Anna Segher’s novel The Seventh Cross was tailored as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy, the top star that ‘acted without acting.’  With expatriate German talent in several key creative positions and a cast list heavy with refugee German actors, this story of a desperate escape from a fictional German concentration camp called Westhofen is a sobering attempt to dramatize conditions in Germany. MGM’s polished production values add to the drama, even if the actors playing the desperate escapees seem too well fed. Less than a year later the American public would be shocked when horrifying news film from liberated concentration camps reached theater screens.

Set in 1936, The Seventh Cross deals with concentration camp escapees before Germany invaded its neighbor countries. Seven internees cut a wire fence and slip into the woods that surround the Westhofen Läger. All were imprisoned for political activism. Several are soon caught, and crucified on a row of trees outside the Commandant’s office. One of these is the escape leader Wallau (Ray Collins). Wallau’s voice narrates the bulk of the story, even after he is dead. We follow escapee George Heisler (Spencer Tracy) as he evades capture and tries to contact ‘activist’ friends in the town of Mainz. Heisler is denied shelter by an old girlfriend (Kaaren Verne) and given furtive aid by a seamstress (Agnes Moorehead). A doctor (Steven Geray) doesn’t report a cut on Heisler’s hand, but complies with the new laws by informing his patient that he is Jewish.

Ms. Tandy’s photo is a studio portrait. 

Heisler watches helplesslu as another escapee, an acrobat (George Suzanne) is cornered on the city rooftops. He encounters a colleague (Konstantin Shayne of  Vertigo) who simply decides to give himself up. Heisler’s contact in Mainz has been arrested, so he drops in on his old friend Paul Roeder (Hume Cronyn), his wife Liesel (Jessica Tandy) and their brood of children. The apolitical Paul is satisfied with the economic improvements brought by the Nazis. He doesn’t understand what Heisler is saying until he is himself detained for an afternoon by the Gestapo. While waiting to contact the growing resistance movement, George is sheltered in a small room by a barmaid, Toni (Signe Hasso). They become lovers. He tells her that moving among his fellow Germans has revived his faith in human nature — he believes his country will recover.

American audiences had already been given two years’ worth of war movies featuring vile Nazi villains dispensing gross injustice. The strongest was an out-and-out exploitation item,  Hitler’s Children. Expatriate Douglas Sirk became an instant bankable Hollywood director with his low-budget  Hitler’s Madman.  The much more sensitive The Seventh Cross must have come as something of an artistic oddity. The Austrian-American director Fred Zinnemann was one of the makers of the acclaimed  People on Sunday, a Weimar-era German film that gave big career boosts to Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer. On just his third feature, Zinnemann was trusted with an important show starring one of MGM’s biggest names. He applied discretion and tact: no slavering S.S. goons or preening Nazi fools are in sight.

Spencer Tracy carries his part well, but the actor who best captures the hopeless desperation of a fugitive from fascism is Ray Collins’ Wallau. He looks beaten down and exhausted, and his sacrifice is the one that hurts the most. Collins is one of the under-appreciated ‘Mercury Theater’ actors that came to Hollywood with Orson Welles. He’s always good; his may be the most sympathetic character in Welles’  Touch of Evil.

 

We hear Wallau’s ghostly voice-over commentary throughout the picture. Collins had also narrated part of the previous year’s  The Human Comedy as a similar, if more sentimental ghost. In this case the device allows Spencer Tracy’s Heisler to wander about silently through most of the picture. At a certain point Wallau simply says that he is no longer needed and is heard no more; that’s when George Heisler begins preaching his optimism for the future of his country, to end the picture on a positive note. Heisler’s optimism must have come off as a feel-good dodge, even in 1944. Just the same, this is one of the few pictures that addresses the overwhelming human tragedy of the war so seriously.

Instead of man-on-the-run thrills, the show focuses on saying something about the human character. Naïve Paul Roeder doesn’t see beyond the false prosperity around him; as soon as Germany goes to war the Nazis will lock him into an ever-more demanding work regimen, and he’ll be prohibited by law from leaving his job. Activist Bruno Sauer (George Macready) turns Paul away, suspecting a trap; his wife Hedy (Katherine Locke, later of the doom-laden noir  Try and Get Me!) shows Paul out.

Director Fred Zinnemann tries out a couple of compositions for psychological effect. A bathroom mirror creates a natural split-screen illusion that depictd Sauer talking to Paul without facing him. A few minutes later the activist leader Franz Marnet (Herbert Rudley of  Decoy) tries to talk to Liesel Roeder, with a chained door splitting the screen in a similar fashion: fear is preventing good people from banding together to oppose evil.

 

Mercury theater player Agnes Moorhead contributes a strong scene, and the film’s margins are populated with well-known European actors helping with the war effort. Bertolt Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel plays an informing janitress; twenty years earlier, she was the torch-throwing worker in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Max Reinhardt’s wife Helen Thimig also plays a small part, unbilled.

Director Fred Zinnemann uses the graphic imagery of men hanged on the tree-crosses as a substitute for the usual scenes of torture and barbarity. As the film does not try for realism it shouldn’t be judged against later films about the atrocities of the camps, or real conditions under Nazi rule. A major theme seems to be to assure Americans that Germans are not all monsters, and that justice and decency will eventually prevail in post-war Europe. Did any wartime movies offer the same sentiments for Japanese civilians?  I can’t think of any.

In place of action or a strong dramatic resolution, The Seventh Cross concludes with a few speeches and a question mark as to George Heisler’s fate. Heisler’s endorsement of the primacy of human decency isn’t particularly compelling, which leaves this well-intentioned and tasteful picture without a powerful ending. Instead of Heisler’s low-key speeches, we would have expecte MGM to end out with something bigger and more emotional.

 

Our associations with two of the actresses is the reverse of their big roles in other movies. Kaaren Verne played a healthy Viennese love interest for Bob Cummings in  Kings Row, and here she’s a terrified ex-sweetheart ready to turn Heisler in. The interesting Signe Hasso is warm and comforing here, but we know her best as a particularly ruthless Nazi agent in the next year’s  House on 92 Street.

Tracy is his familiar solid presence, although watching him be so serious for two hours isn’t always a treat. It’s amusing in the end that George Heisler and Toni have ‘invisible MGM sex’ — only the fact that he has to re-tie his tie suggests that they’ve done the deed. The film’s big appeal is through the large, expert and well-directed supporting cast. This is reportedly Jessica Tandy’s first American movie and the first of several roles she played opposite her real-life husband Hume Cronyn. She is absolutely adorable.

Cronyn was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his likeable German everyman. It seems odd now that his Paul Roeder is detained by the Gestapo, and isn’t thrown into a torture chamber. Despite suspecting that he’s a friend of a wanted camp escapee, the agents politely steer him toward their car, and let him free after just one full day of interrogations. They don’t even assign an agent to follow him. “It’s not a problem” Paul insists, “the only way the Gestapo knows anything is if you tell them.”

 

 

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of The Seventh Cross is the expected dazzling digital clean-up of the MGM picture. Fred Zinnemann’s precise direction and Karl Freund’s rich camerawork yield a look elevated above the MGM norm, despite using the same kinds of sets. An extended rooftop chase uses an impressive, multi-story street set. The sequence now reminds us of the finale of the French classic  Panique made several years later.

Roy Webb’s music track contributes an appropriate mood of somber menace. I had thought Webb to be exclusively a composer for RKO. A film music expert would probably know how often he composed for non-RKO pictures.

 

The WAC includes three of Fred Zinnemann’s many MGM short subjects. ‘Passing Parade’ dramas address America’s first surgical operation, and a series of weird inheritances. A  ‘Crime Does Not Pay’ two-reeler is a lecture on the smuggling of illegal immigrants.

An original trailer all but ignores the film’s dark subject matter, to instead sell the star power of Spencer Tracy. Much of the trailer is a re-cap of the actor’s MGM career highlights. Were studios in 1944 finding that audiences were less interested in war-related stories?

The fictional Westhofen concentration camp has a row of seven trees that are re-purposed as crosses on which to crucify recaptured escapees. I have a question based on a vision from a half-remembered movie, that needs to be asked in a footnote.  ^*

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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The Seventh Cross
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Three short subjects directed by Fred Zinnemann, One Against the World (1939), Forbidden Passage (1941) and Your Last Act (1941)
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: July 24, 2026
(7554cros)

^*   This is an unforgivable personal tangent. As teenagers, we watched and rewatched a feature cut-down version of the old TV series  Victory at Sea. At the end of the two-hour movie, the editors add a special, emotional montage not seen in the TV series itself. This poetic montage is about the hope for a better world born out of the horror of war. A key image in the montage is — as best I can recall — a panning shot of what looks like a field of crosses, with men crucified on them, all backlit through hellish smoke. It looks like a piece of footage grabbed as a stock shot, and used for its poetic-dramatic impact, expressing the sacrifice of the multitudes that died in the conflict of WW2. Is it from another source, or could it be an extravagant image planned for the finale of The Seventh Cross, that was vetoed in post?  I haven’t been able to see the feature cut of Victory at Sea for almost 60 years … did I just dream the association with those tree-crosses in this movie?

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Here’s Joe Dante on The Seventh Cross: