Verboten! **** (1959, James Best, Susan Cummings, Tom Pittman, Paul Dubov, Harold Day) – Classic Movie Review 5085

‘A MAD GENERATION… Spawned In Lust… Consumed By Hate!’ Writer-producer-director Samuel Fuller’s 1959 drama of troubled life in postwar Germany after the fall of the Third Reich is an intelligent, robust and tough-toned movie. There is a non-fraternisation rule and it is forbidden for American servicemen to fall in love with German women.

James Best gives one of his career best performances as young American Sergeant David Brent, who is detailed to the troops keeping the peace there, a position he decides to chuck in (as he must) to marry the young German woman, Helga (Susan Cummings), who saved him at the end of the war.

But she has a young brother, Franz (Harold Daye), who belongs to the neo-Nazi guerrilla movement, the Werewolves, who have sinister plans for Sgt Brent.

Fuller’s masterly work is a consistently interesting and thoughtful movie.

Bizarrely, Paul Anka sings the title track (music Mack David, lyrics Harry Sukman).

Also in the cast are Tom Pittman, Paul Dubov, Dick Kallman, Stuart Randall, Steven Geray, Anna Hope, Robert Boon, Sasha Harden, Paul Busch, Neyle Morrow, Joe Turkel and Charles Horvath.

Fuller has a cameo as the radio announcer of the Armed Forces Network in the Rhine river cruise scene.

Verboten! is the final RKO film, a co-production with director Fuller’s Globe Enterprises, and was released by Columbia Pictures in March 1959.

It is featured in the documentary A Fuller Life (2013).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5085

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