Review of Verboten! (1959) by Allan C — 17 Jul 2014

Audacious war film by auteur director Samuel Fuller. This film is outrageous, even by fuller standards, starting the film with a dead body being riddled with machine gun fire, or playing a Paul Anka love song over scenes of war and destruction during the opening credits, and using Wagner to highlight operatic scenes of war long before Francis Ford Coppola did so in his audacious war film "Apocalypse, Now".

This film is the Fuller, punch-in-the-gut gritty version of "Judgement at Nuremberg," telling the story of post WWII Germany through a love story of sorts between American GI James Best and German fraulein Susan Cummings.

Nuremberg is a much slicker production, but Fuller's post WWII Germany is filled with unrepentant neo-Nazi fighters still carrying on the war, food riots, rape, brutality, discrimination and grueling documentation of Nazi atrocities.

However, as edgy as this film is, it's undermined by overuse of stock footage and documentary elements that take you our of the melodrama about the tension filled relationship between Best and Cummings.

Some may find Fuller's in-you-face style lacking subtlety, but that's what makes this a Sam Fuller picture and not one by Stanley Kramer. Still, Fuller films and look like nothing else coming out of Hollywood at the time and is well worth watching.