No Escape

A few days back, someone on one of the movie boards I frequent mentioned watching a B movie from Monogram on TCM: I Escaped from the Gestapo. The poster's description made it sound interesting, so I looked to see it was available on the Watch TCM app, so I hadn't saved it to my DVR. In fact, it's still available for viewing until April 27, so I'm writing up a post now to give everyone the chance to catch it.

The first thing to note is that the movie got a re-release under the title No Escape, and that's the title on the print TCM ran, although when searching for the movie within the app it the listings had it as I Escaped from the Gestapo. The person who may or may not escape is a man named Torgut Lane, played by Dean Jagger who at this time either still had a full head or hair or else was wearing a toupee, as his more recognizable bald self is not to be seen. A brief opening animation turns the anti-Semitic octopus trope on its head, depicting Nazi Germany as an octopus with its tentacles in everything. We then cut to a prison in the US, where Lane is serving time as a counterfeiter. A fellow prisoner is about to be broken out, and takes Lane along for the ride, helped by people on the outside who have a few conveniently dead bodies to throw under a train to put the cops off the trail.

Now, since we know the title of the movie the viewers can guess who this gang that helped Lane is, but for understandable reasons he doesn't have much idea, beyond the common sense knowledge that it's not uncommon for prisoners to turn on each other. The breakout gang takes Lane to the California coast, where they tell him they'd like him to do some counterfeiting for them. They then proceed to put him in a locked room, which immediately raises his suspicion. Martin (John Carradine) informs him that this is their way of checking his loyalty.

Their first job for him is a simple one that they don't really need him for: merchant marine working permits and boarding passes for a certain ship. Meanwhile, we discover that the gang is using a boardwalk arcade as a front for their activities, all the better for them since it gives them access to the coast. Among the attractions at their business is one of those "record your voice" things, and the men, in the Gestapo if you hadn't figured that out yet, use that to get information on ships and things. (This seems like a huge plot hole to me, since merchant sailors wouldn't have committed information about their movements to recording.)

Lane figures out a way to jimmy the lock on his door, at least to open it enough to be able to eavesdrop on his captors. Knowing that he's been asked to counterfeit stuff for the merchant marine, and then hearing about the explosion aboard the ship with which he was technically involved, he's able to put two and two together. But how is he going to be able to fight against his captors? After all, they're holding him hostage and they're the ones with guns.

I Escaped from the Gestapo was made at the height of World War II, so you know that you're going to get a morale-booster here in which even a criminal like Lane is still willing to help America against the wicked Nazis. You also know that the Nazis are going to get what's coming to them in the end. And, since it's just a B movie, you know that you're going to get all of it on the cheap. The result is a movie that's more worth seeing as a product of its time than as cinematic art, much like all the episodic 1970s television that's on the various digital subchannels. I Escaped from the Gestapo will probably entertain you, but isn't terribly memorable.