Directed by Samuel Fuller ("Pickup on South Street", "The Big Red One"). The unfortunate poster promoting the film makes it look like it is a juvenile deliquent film but it's not.Opening with a syrupy love song ("Verboten!") sung by Paul Anka, the film is set in Germany in the days following WW2. It's part war movie, part love story. Our main characters are an American soilder - played by James Best (later of "Dukes of Hazzard" fame) - and german nurse Helga (Susan Cummings) who treats him after he's shot.
The title "Verboten" is the German word for "forbidden," and refers to the taboo nature of his relationship with a German woman (Susan Cummings) who eventually becomes his wife.
Since soldiers were forbidden to fraternize with the Germans, Best decides to quit the military. Rather than return to the States, he signs on with the American Military Government (AMG), dispensing food and other rations to the devastated German people. Once married, Brent and Helga's happiness is threatened by the harsh economic conditions of war-torn Germany and the rise of neo-fascism in the form of young underground Himmlerites calling themselves the Werewolves, who scavenge food, commit sabotage, and threaten the newly-forged peace.
In one scene, local German neo nazis protest the American's occupation, and the people wave huge signs that say, "Americans go home" and "East German Eats - West Germany Starves". Best becomes fed up with hearing the Germans blaming the USA for their misfortune, demanding food and medicine from the AMG. "We're not here as liberators!" he shouts at the angry mob, "We're here as conquerors! And don't you forget it!" Immediately thereafter he dives, fists swinging, into the crowd of ungrateful "krauts."
At the end of the film, The GIs advance upon a bombed out, sniper-pocked village, their dance of death choreographed to the strains of Beethoven's 5th Symphony (a favorite piece of Fuller's, which also appears in The Naked Kiss, 1964). Fuller also flavors the film with the grandiose works of Richard Wagner, whose operatic works have come to represent both sweeping powers and anti-Semitism lurking beneath German legends.
I watched this movie at a screening in Chicago in May 2009 with a packed house; everyone I talked to after the show loved this movie, and we couldn't stop talking about it.
Director Samuel Fuller served in the First U.S. Infantry Division during WWII (the legendary "Big Red One") and was part of a military unit that liberated a Nazi concentration camp near Falkenau. Corporal Fuller shot 16mm home movie footage of the camp, and this material later became the centerpiece of the 1988 documentary Falkenau, the Impossible, in which he returns to the site and recounts the experience.
The memory of the death camps was scorched in Fuller's mind and he wanted others to witness the same, lest we forget. When Helga's teenage brother and aspiring Werewolf Franz (Harold Daye) refuses to believe the horror stories of the Third Reich, she takes him to the Nuremberg trials, where he and the audience are subjected to a no-punches-pulled, documentary-style summation of the atrocities committed by the Nazis -- narrated by Fuller himself. Seldom were moviegoers of 1958 subjected to such horrific images, especially woven into the fabric of a traditional war movie. The audacious scene is quintessential Fuller -- a cinematic punch in the gut. Fuller was unafraid to use the most harrowing footage from the death camps.
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