I’ve never seen a Samuel Fuller film like Verboten! where the soundtrack essentially dialogued with the images: an overblown Hollywood love theme blares during the opening credits over scenes of urban warfare; Beethoven’s 5th booms while American soldiers hunt a Nazi sniper through the bombed out ruins of a German city; Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries nervously shimmers as Nazi terrorists destroy buildings, sabotage American supply transports, and murder GIs. The theme of “listening” is a constant in Verboten!, perhaps in large part because the film feels largely unfinished and haphazardly crammed with awkward stock footage. There are many scenes where newsreel announcers and beleaguered American soldiers intone exposition about the fall of the Third Reich and the Allied Occupation’s struggle to rebuild German society. Verboten! is notable for being Fuller’s first film set during World War Two. As always, he is more interested in the human element of warfare than the actual combat. The film is a Reconstruction drama: Sergeant David Brent (James Best) falls in love and marries a German woman named Helga Schiller (Susan Cummings), gets a job in the Military Government’s Food Office, and grapples with the twin threats of Werwolf—a Nazi group devoted to sabotaging and destroying the Allied occupiers—and the realization that his wife may have only married him because, as an American, he was a “meal ticket.” Curiously for a director so skilled at painting with human emotions, the histrionics between Best and Cummings are the film’s weakest part—other than the ubiquitous stock footage. Verboten! feels incomplete. It begs the question of whether the obtrusive stock footage and narration was a deliberate cost-cutting technique on Fuller’s part or a practical method of suturing together bits and pieces from a movie whose funding was pulled before it was finished.
6/10
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