In two current movies, The Desert Fox and Decision Before Dawn, the leading figures are all military men, involved in very different ways with something called “treason.” These movies, here analyzed by Nathan Glick, reflect the peculiar problems raised for the military mind by politics and war in our age, as well as the contrasting approaches of Germans, Britons, and Americans to the dilemmas involved in working for the enemy against one’s own government.
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Before the French Revolution, wars were usually conducted by professional armies whose interests were those of any working group: high wages, low hours, and job security. The mercenary soldier fought for his pay check and if he went over to the enemy, his motive was, doubtless, better pay—or more loot. Ours, however, is an age of the citizen army and ideological war, and treason in wartime has taken on more profound connotations. It reveals a man’s feeling toward his origins; it involves his political ideology and his code of ethics. Two current films—The Desert Fox and Decision Before Dawn—take up the question of treason and ideology in the last war and, by their juxtaposition of a British and an American viewpoint, illuminate some of the subject’s dark corners. Produced by an American studio and directed by Hollywood’s Henry Hathaway, The Desert Fox is British in every other respect: literary source, cast, outlook, and manner. Decision Before Dawn combines an American elasticity of mind and feeling with a less frequently encountered sensibility and warmth.
The Desert Fox opens, without credits, on a sequence of movement so cleanly executed and so lightning-quick that, while the eye follows it in a kind of hypnotized trance, the mind stands still. The purpose of this scene, a British commando night raid on the German army’s African desert staff headquarters, is to endow the Rommel legend with a maximum of cinematic vividness. When the raid is over and the commandos, hooded like interplanetary creatures of science fiction, are gone, one of their wounded asks a German soldier: “Did we get him?” The prologue closes on the reply: “Are you serious, Englishman!”
Then, with a burst of drums and trumpets, the customary credits appear on the screen, and anticlimax sets in. The script writer, working from Brigadier Desmond Young’s recent best-selling book of the same title, makes a brave try at preserving the Bulldog Drummond image of Rommel. The sound track gives us Auchinleck’s instructions to British officers to deflate the idea widespread among their soldiers that the enemy commander is a superman. And Desmond Young appears as himself, a prisoner of war behind the German lines who is saved, through the Field Marshal’s adherence to military punctilio, from having to execute an un-sportsman-like German command. But when we finally reach Rommel himself, we see James Mason character-acting with the “business” of a chronic sniffle and a perplexed brow, in the stale tradition of Paul Muni’s Zola.
The Rommel who broods through most of the film curiously contradicts every expectation raised by the prologue and early scenes. Instead of a history-making figure of daring and military intuition, we are shown a stodgy, intellectually quiescent family man. It is true that the film picks up Rommel’s career at the turning point in Germany’s military fortunes and concentrates on his place in a political sphere which was admittedly alien to him. But this hardly seems an adequate explanation for the failure to maintain a heroic myth throughout the length of the film. The portrait that emerges is the result, partly, of the movie-makers’ timorous awe in the face of a hallowed military reputation and partly of the real Rommel’s intractability, even after death, to their lionizing tendencies. Paradoxically, the weaknesses of the film have produced a characterization of Rommel, and through him of a certain type of German officer, which is more persuasive and probably more truthful than was intended.
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The military mind is typically conservative and military life does not conduce to eccentricity. It is thus almost proper to approach a military personality soberly, standing (as it were) at attention. The military ideology, furthermore, is among the few formidable supranational ideologies of modern times. A natural occupational basis for the affinity among military men of warring countries inheres in their isolation from the rest of the community. They develop a practical, emotional, and ultimately an ethical stake in the code they live by, so that there rises a realm of military morality which is distinct both from the democratic ethos and the totalitarian. From the democratic viewpoint, military life inflicts too many indignities on its soldiers; its code is too rigidly cruel. The totalitarian ruler, on the other hand, finds the military code too protective of its members, potentially too independent a locus of power: thus the development of the preventive purge. In The Desert Fox, the problem is raised, but not faced directly, as to why Rommel and the others involved in the July 1944 assassination plot against Hitler were not previously purged. The answer given, unintentionally, by the film is that these men had shown themselves so politically apathetic in every previous implementation of Nazi policy that they were deemed reliable. And in almost every sense they were. What finally broke these men from the regime was not its bestiality, not even its military setbacks, but the combination of military defeat and the violation of proper respect for established military authority. The generals were humiliated by having to take orders from the upstart “Austrian corporal.” But they would have endured even this if only the corporal had won.
The Desert Fox has been attacked as a craven and dangerous attempt to rehabilitate the German generals. Actually, its total effect is deflationary rather than the opposite: the generals here are not only personally dull and politically retarded, but militarily unimpressive. If Rommel was a tactical genius, this movie gives no evidence of it. The aspect of the film which has led to the accusation of “whitewash” is its reflection of the workings of that peculiar machine—the military mind—particularly the British military mind. The tone of the tribute to Rommel is set in Desmond Young’s opening remark about the Field Marshal’s “scrupulous regard for the rules of warfare,” and climaxed by Churchill’s curious statement at the end that Rommel “deserves our respect because, although a loyal German soldier [my italics], he turned against the fanatic [Hitler].” Churchill, being a political as well as a military leader, insists on having it both ways: the military virtue of loyalty and the political virtue of conspiracy-at-the-proper-time.
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Behind the tributes of Young and Churchill lies a peculiarly British approach to warfare. William James spoke of sport as providing a moral equivalent of war; for the British officer, war is the moral equivalent of sport. The Wooden Horse, an understated but highly exciting British film about the escape of two British officer prisoners of war from a German camp, regards the enterprise as a game played under stringent rules. The German treatment of the British officer prisoners is unusually liberal—a modified “honor system” prevails—and on neither side is political ideology broached. The simile of sportsmanship is carried out by the use of a gymnasium “horse” to cover up the underground burrowing preliminary to the escape attempt, and by the “teamwork” which is the keynote of the escape organization.
It is not considered fitting for the military person to ask political or personal questions, and that is why, in The Desert Fox, Rommel remains an unexplored quantity outside his military role. Churchill had tentatively and delicately raised the question of treason, but at the very end of the film, when there was no time left to pursue it. Treason is not a subject the English can approach with detachment. The long political tradition, the geographical insularity and ethnic homogeneity of England have given a special connotation to the idea of national loyalty. Rebecca West, an Englishwoman of great intelligence and cosmopolitan interests, stands as a case in point. In her book The Meaning of Treason, while she does not absolutely exclude the possibility of a justifiable preference for the ideals of an enemy country, she nevertheless regards this with a purely instinctive disgust. “A hearth gives warmth,” and to forget this, she implies, constitutes a form of personal, physical, and ethical perversion.
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The argument of hearth and home, however loudly sounded on patriotic occasions, does not carry the same inevitability for Americans as it does for the English. The United States is a nation of “voluntary” citizens most of whose families have lived here less than a century. For them the memory of exodus is as much a part of their heritage as the cumulation of village gossip is for the British. Americans are constantly faced with the possibility of having to fight against their former fatherlands or their families’ countries of origin.
Within a tight, visually fascinating melodrama of espionage, Decision Before Dawn raises the ethical problem of treason more earnestly and with far more complexity than The Desert Fox. A German medic corporal—twenty, highly sensitive—is taken prisoner by the Americans in France, and volunteers to return to Germany as an American spy. The film convinces us that this is not a case of wartime opportunism. The youth believes that his humanitarian ideals will be furthered by a German defeat. Yet the Americans are unsure about how to feel toward this young enemy soldier, converted not by American propaganda but by his own experience.
The colonel in charge of the Intelligence outfit takes the classic military view: traitors are useful as spies for one’s own side, but they are never defensible. A traitor is a traitor no matter what his motives. The military man regards ideological defection with the same suspicion General Patton displayed toward psychoneurosis: it has no place in the science of warfare.
“A Kraut is a Kraut,” on the other hand, tossed off unthinkingly by a good-natured GI, represents a thoroughgoing refusal to think about the matter at all. The enlisted man not only accepts but oversimplifies the propaganda of his own side; war is not a matter of honor or of tactics but simply of nationality, which for him includes ideology.
The moral burden of the film falls on the lieutenant, played by Richard Basehart who, along with William Holden, has become Hollywood’s representation of the tough but moody and vulnerable all-American type. He starts out with a generalized skepticism—preferring the boastfully opportunist German to the idealist—and only after personal involvement begins tentatively to refine his views. The process is left incomplete, however. The death of the German youth serves as the basis for the film’s tribute to his idealism and physical heroism at the same time that it means a kind of tribal punishment for his being both a German and a traitor.
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The complexity of the American soldier’s judgment of the boy is more than matched by the subtlety with which the film independently observes him. There has been some criticism that the German boy’s portrayal is inadequate in terms of his family, education, and opinions. It seems to me precisely the virtue of the characterization of “Happy” (so nicknamed for his pensive face and large sad eyes) that it is presented in behavioristic terms only, since he is basically an individual without ideology, whose responses are instinctive and open.
The youth’s physical movements as he advances in stages from Frankfort to Mannheim have a somnambulistic quality, as if his situation was impossible to bear with senses fully alert. In his new role, the young German is spiritually a stranger walking past the familiar public landmarks of his childhood—the railroad terminals, bridges, monuments and streets, a museum and an opera house (both bombed out). No other film about Germany that I have seen captures the mixture of nostalgia and horror which any sensitive German must have felt returning from the front to the ruined cities. (In The Wooden Horse there is a contrasting impersonal view of similar public places in a German seaport, but the camera’s pragmatic scrutiny in that film is appropriate to the experience of two escaping foreigners.) More impressive even than his use of the physical background are director Anatol Litvak’s heightened though apparently casual documentary-style shots of the neat, dogged, submissive German civilians lined up at mushrooming check points.
“Happy’s” trancelike passivity in the face of his disintegrating homeland coincides with his catalytic role. Like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, he serves to precipitate other people’s moral decisions. In his presence, the German prostitute makes a compassionate gesture of retribution, the SS general tries stiffly to be affable and frank, the French girl falls in love despite her theoretical hatred of all “Boches,” and the American lieutenant reexamines the ethics of treason. But the moral force he exerts on others does not solve his own dilemma, namely, that whatever the action he takes, it will have tragic consequences.
“Happy’s” decision in each incident can only be based on the pressures of conflicting demands on his humanity at any particular moment. He is faced with the fact that the information he is giving the Americans will endanger his father, a doctor in a hospital alongside a crucial chemical plant. This he can endure; yet, in one of the most convincing and moving touches of the film, he will not himself kill, by an overdose of adrenalin, a cardiac German general, even though the latter’s survival will mean the death of a private who went AWOL to be with his family during a bombing raid, as well as many more deaths less immediately tangible. He can endanger his father because the act by which he does so is not directly related to the outcome, and the outcome, though likely, is not inevitable. The information must first get to American headquarters; it must be deemed sufficiently important for action; planes must be sent out, and bombs dropped. Somewhere along the line, something may happen to avert the catastrophe. But when it comes to murdering the von Stroheim type general (who plays “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik“ on the phonograph after condemning the deserter to death), the human object is too close. The dominating impulse of the youth is not heroism and righteousness, but a hatred of violence arid of directly cruel action.
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It is perhaps the sign of a trend that Oskar Werner’s pale spiritual face in this role is of a type that we last saw in the pacifist movies of the early 30’s: Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front and Phillips Holmes in The Man I Killed. The use of so sympathetic a character would seem to signify also an American recognition of the need to discriminate among Germans. At least three basic types are presented and the implication is left that the fate of Germany depends on their varying political weight and our ability to find a suitable approach to each of them.
The portrait of “Tiger,” the neither-good-nor-bad German, is in some ways the most interesting and socially substantial,, Once an animal trainer in a circus, he knows that all slogans are frauds and ruses, and is himself taken in by none, the Allied as little as the Nazi. He represents a development which Rebecca West failed to envisage in her theory that the disposition to treason in modern times rises from urban rootless-ness and disembodied intellectuality. “Tiger’s” native heath is neither a country nor an idea, but simply himself. He represents the non-fanatic who responds only in terms of pure, immediate self-interest. His opposite number is the “true believer” which the film presents in two standard variations: the short, greasy, sensual motorcycle courier and the intense, “spiritual,” bespectacled Gestapo agent.
The third type is the man of good will, like “Happy,” cornered in an almost impossible situation, conflicting loyalties stretched like barbed wire over his sensibilities, whose ideals can be both decent and real. It is one of the distinctions of Decision Before Dawn that it reminds us that this type, on which the hope for a decent rehabilitated Germany depends, still exists.
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