Verboten!

A film set in Germany after the war. David is an American soldier. He is wounded in Germany and a woman named Helga hides him. When the war ends he leaves the army and stays; he starts working for the occupation administration and marries her. That is where the trouble starts. The war looks over and is not: a group of young people has gone underground and is carrying out sabotage. These are boys raised in the regime's last years who know nothing else. That is what the film is interested in: how an ideology continues after defeat, and what it does to children. In the middle, real footage from the Nuremberg trials is used. One of the characters is sitting in the courtroom and the camera moves straight into the archive record; that passage is the film's hardest. Samuel Fuller directed. It was low-budget and made with resources outside the studio system. James Best and Susan Cummings are in the leads. A little-known example for anyone who likes postwar stories and Fuller's direct filmmaking. For a viewer expecting polish, it is roughly made and some sections are plainly instructional in tone.