None Shall Escape, a 1944 Oscar nominee for Best Original Story, has been given a Blu-ray only release by Sony. Although not a huge hit in its original engagements, this film, directed by André De Toth (House of Wax) was not a “B” picture as is commonly believed, but a major release from Columbia, whose only other Oscar nominee that year was the musical Cover Girl, which had been nominated for five Oscars and won one for its score.

Although largely dismissed in its initial run, None Shall Escape has grown in stature. Filmed in 1943 and released in early 1944, it is an uncanny predictor of things to come. Acknowledged as the first Holocaust film, its handling of the fictional post-war Nazi tribunal in Warsaw predates the similar handling of the real-life 1948 Nazi tribunal depicted in 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg.

Alexander Knox stars as an unrepentant Nazi Reich Commissioner in the same year in which he would receive an Oscar nomination of his own for playing Woodrow Wilson in Best Picture nominee Wilson. His character’s post-war trial in the not-so-distant future begins with Henry Travers (It’s a Wonderful Life) as a Polish Catholic priest recounting his behavior in 1919.

Knox had been a German teacher in a small Polish town before the outbreak of World War I. He had returned to Germany to fight in the war, returning to the Polish town after the war where he is greeted with skepticism even by Travers’ niece, local teacher Marsha Hunt (The Human Comedy) who had been his fiancée. That skepticism turns to anger when he rapes one of his students (Shirley Mills) and her boyfriend (Elvin Field) is blamed for the crime before the girl confesses to Hunt that it was Knox before committing suicide. Getting off in the courts due to lack of evidence, Knox returns to Germany where he joins the rising Nazi Party and rises with it.

The next witness is Knox’s brother (Erik Rolf), a socialist writer with a wife (Ruth Nelson, later the first Mrs. Wilson to Knox’s Wilson) and two children. We first see a harmonious relationship between the brothers when they are reunited in 1923 but see a different relationship in 1933 when Knox has his brother sent to a concentration camp for treason and takes his son and turns him into a Nazi youth. No one will tell Rolf what happened to his wife and daughter.

(more…)