The war is over and a Nazi is on trial (thereby anticipating the Nuremberg Trials). Three witnesses tell the story, the first being vicar Henry Travers. In a Polish village in 1919, a German teacher Alexander Knox is to marry another teacher, Marsha Hunt, put she's a bit put out by his political beliefs and calls it off. He's later accused of raping a schoolgirl but there's not enough evidence and he flees to Germany. His brother Erik Rolfe tells how Knox became a Nazi and had his own brother taken to a concentration camp. And finally Hunt comes on, and relates how Knox came back to the village with his now radicalised nephew Richard Crane, who fixes his attention on her daughter Dorothy Morris. Knox is as vile to the people as you would expect, but when he orders a trainload of Jews, kids included, to be machine gunned before our eyes, on screen, it's strong stuff indeed.
My only criticism is I would have liked the court to sentence him to death at the end, rather than the rather woolly plea that the United Nations will do right.
Our print (originally broadcast on TCM) is rather dark, unfortunately, as it's shot by the great Lee Garmes. Edited by Charles Nelson, designed by Lionel Banks, music by Ernst Toch, for Columbia.
Knox carries it well. He played the President in Wilson, but we'd know him from The Night My Number Came Up, The Longest Day, Accident, Puppet on a Chain, Nicholas and Alexandra.
