The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Seven inmates escape from a German concentration camp in 1936. The Nazis round them up, one-by-one, and hang their bodies from crosses erected on the grounds. Only George Heisler evades the dragnet.He seeks refuge in his hometown of Mainz, in a terrifying journey. He watches a comrade commit suicide, and suffers betrayal by his former girlfriend. Meanwhile, German resistance volunteers try desperately to find George.Halfway through the film, he decides to look up an old friend. Hume Cronyn completely steals the show as the armaments worker, Paul Roeder. As soon as he joyfully calls out George's name, the entire mood of the film changes from relentless terror to suspenseful optimism.This is an unusual Hollywood movie for 1944. Most films of the era portrayed Germans as irredeemably evil. "The Seventh Cross" differentiates between Nazis and German anti-Nazis. It shows how ordinary people, like Paul Roeder, can rise to the occasion during a moral crisis.George Heisler is right when he says, "There are no better men than Paul Roeder."

Spencer Tracy in an earnestly pensive performance, playing one of seven concentration camp escapees in 1936 Germany who are hunted by Nazi soldiers. Dream-like ambiance and a harrowing undermining makes the film a relatively gripping experience, yet the writing is a bit timid (it's hard to discern why some of these men were incarcerated in the first place when others, such as Hume Cronyn's factory worker, roam free). Director Fred Zinnemann makes an attempt to show that not all of Nazi-era Germany was populated by "slaughter-happy butchers", and the fear and paranoia seems accurate enough, but not many of these characters convince--not Agnes Moorehead's dress designer nor Steven Geray's Jewish doctor. They're just placards in the story, and screenwriter Helen Deutsch, working from a book by Anna Seghers, hasn't given them any depth. A last-act romance between Tracy and a pretty barmaid feels tacked on, and the upbeat ending is most likely another writer's convenience...one would be wise to assume events didn't quite transpire this way in actuality. **1/2 from ****

Seventh Cross, The (1944) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Hard hitting Ww2 drama has Spencer Tracy playing one of seven men who escape from a concentration camp. When the other six men are captured or killed, Tracy knows that the entire country will be looking for him so his desperate search for help grows more difficult. Whenever great WW2 films are discussed this one here hardly ever gets mentioned, which is a real shame because this film turned out to be a real gem that works on so many levels and once again features a great performance by Tracy. Zinnemann does a great job directing this film and what I loved most is the fact that Tracy's character is under constant threat of being captured and sent back to the camp. Tracy can't trust anyone and must take big risks in trying to reach out for anyone to help him and this here is perfectly captured by the director. There's a tense atmosphere running throughout the film and it's what I'd compare to a feather blowing in the wind. Tracy's performance has him, what seems like, floating through the air because we can feel the pain and terror in him of being caught. To make matters worse, he reaches his hometown where he must try and decide which of his former friends would help him and which would turn him in. Tracy's performance is very deep and intense but it seems as if he is walking on egg shells throughout the film and floating in the air. The way he moves about is something truly amazing to watch. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy play a husband and wife who Tracy goes to for help. Cronyn nearly steals the film with his flawless performance. The only thing that hinders the film is some of the narration, which is a tad bit over the top at times.

"The Seventh Cross" (1944) directed by Fred Zinnemann is a free adaptation from a novel made eight years before about concentration camps in Germany, during the national socialism reign in 1936. It seems like a documentary now, as about a peaceful crowd that for instance observes a fugitive at the roofs as if it was an acrobatic meeting with a circus man, that takes the suicide as option or as concerning another who escapes and changes the suit in a local theater at town, just before enters in the net lace of friends under servitude.The sensation in which by night the main character of the tranquil fugitive is sight as an anodyne citizen inside the tramway and confounded for a while - it seems to him - with a pickpocket, it is of course the main impression of normality of the current life here, even though it is at the core of any society where common natural behavior it was the same, if it was not as there. There are in this movie an air of naturalism and even a visit to the headquarters of Gestapo in Berlin, as it was likewise a mere chance to the German people. To see Germany before its destruction by the war is one of the imaginative points of the Zinnemann conception in this adaptation from the novel, in which the thirties are retro imagined in the forties, before the end of the war. The way in which the fugitive of a concentration camp is helped are conditioned by circumstances out of any established rule, but by the convenience of the daily activity of a kind of circle of friends, occasionally concerned by the idea for putting someone near another town, as which it seems with a port by night where he is lodged during a while at a restaurant with rooms. The fact that the young maid was in love for him is mere chance for the protagonist of the scape, which was at the risk of failure by the pressure of the local authorities. In a kind of cat and rat gamble with traditionally oppression, that took the genre of smugglers and sailors before any departure abroad, whose sequence is shown with such a domestic darkness for those who think about that with discretion, if anyway it was forbidden without people support in these conditions of humankind and bravery.