CinemaSerf
6/19/2022
There is just too much lacking about this to give it much traction with the audience. Set in the Great War, Canadian officer "McGrath" (Douglass Montgomery) manages to flee an Hun POW camp (killing a guard in the process) and make his way to Berlin. That's where he meets hooker "Anna" (Constance Bennett) and the pair decide, with Oskar Homolka's doggedly determined detective "Götz" hot on their trail, to try and make their way to the safety of Holland. The plot suffers badly from plausibility issues. Had it been made six or seven years later it could have been reasonably assumed to have been intended as a piece of WWII propaganda. As it is, it offers a muddled appraisal of Imperial Germany, of Germans and also of a fairly flawed cat and mouse game. Neither the lead actors, nor the writing, are anywhere near good enough to hold the film together, and though the photography is more effective in illustrating their perils, the rest of it is just a bit too romantically facile.
