Resisting Enemy Interrogation (1944)

Strong and Moving!

Perfect cast and a good story

Beautiful, moving film.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Interesting to see some of the comments here, questioning how realistic the movie is. The movie is an excellent depiction of the very techniques used by the very real-life WWII German interrogator, Hanns-Joachim Scharff. Scharff, who originally wasn't even supposed to be an interrogator, found the traditional ideas of using brutality distasteful and ineffective. The methods shown in the movie, such as making small talk, pretending to know all the details, a change of scenery, etc are all very well-documented, and are still recognized interrogation approaches taught to this day. Incidentally, Scharff (who's notoriety I can only suspect inspired this training film) emigrated to the U.S. after the war and became a big time mosaic artist; some of his artwork can be seen on Disney properties.

Resisting Enemy Interrogation (1944) *** 1/2 (out of 4) WW2 drama got an Oscar nomination as Best Feature Documentary. The film tells the story of a group of American soldiers who are taken prisoner by German's and must keep their mouths shut so that they won't tip off the enemy. The German's, however, have their own form of interrogation to try and break through and learn of a future attack. This film was made to teach soldiers the type of tricks they might come across if taken hostage and on that level the film works just fine the real bonus here is the fact that the movie is told through the eyes and minds of the German's. I've seen a lot of these WW2 documentaries and for the most part they always look at things from the American point of view so it was great seeing it from the other way. I'm not sure how true the film is because all of the German officials promise not to torture the soldiers and they don't but it seems like they would have crossed the line if they really needed information on an upcoming attack. The performances are also very good with Arthur Kennedy leading the way as the main American soldier. I'm really not sure how this film got into the documentary department as it really plays out like a feature film, running 66=minutes and the only documentary type film-making is some opening and closing narration, which is aimed at American soldiers. As with a lot of these WW2 shorts, the film is pretty graphic at times, which the production code at the time seemed to overlook in this type of a film.

Other comments cover the quality; the interesting part is how the Germans identify the weaknesses of each man and play to them. I don't know if the Nazis were always as subtle as this (I imagine a lit cigarette to the groin or pulling out a few fingernails to a subject or his friends would encourage a frank and open discussion).Good film, relatively propaganda free. It's interesting to watch the way American WWII propaganda treats the Germans as opposed to the Japanese. The Germans are usually portrayed as sophisticated and slimy while the Japanese are shown as little more than cunning animals. Compare "Identification of the Japanese Zero" with this film.Watchable on its own terms, interesting to watch the Germans working on each guy in their own way and piecing together the scraps they get from each man to finding the whole story. I imagine the black-bag boys at Gitmo are doing much the same thing.

Thanks to TCM for giving us an opportunity to see this gem. Made by the Army Air Force's famous First Movie Unit well into the war (1944), this is one of their most polished efforts. It has a simple, but effective narrative: a US air crew of 5 is downed by the Nazis, who use every trick in the book (short of torture) to pump information out of them: ingratiation, intimidation, deceit and psychological welfare. None of the downed fliers means to co-operate with the enemy, but each in his own way contributes some information to their clever Nazis captors, which is then pieced together by the Nazi commanding officer, somewhat flamboyantly portrayed by Carl Esmond. The consequences are disaster.The point of the film as a training device (forcefully driven home by Lloyd Nolan in the closing sequence) was that ANY information, no matter how innocent or trivial seeming on its face, could complete the jigsaw puzzle for Nazi intelligence services. All that should EVER be revealed to ANYONE outside your own crew once you were captured was name, rank and serial number. A simple lesson, you would suppose, but for 70 minutes (rather lengthy by the genre's standards, I think) the point is expertly honed by a fairly effective little drama.In addition to Nolan, the other "big name" actor here is a young Arthur Kennedy, who appeared in many excellent films over the following quarter century.