LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Andre De Toth: Escape
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Measured against today's standards of film violence, de Toth is more of a humanist than even Jean Renoir, but there is nonetheless a subtle sadism, an undercurrent of brutality, running through his work. The massacre of Jews in None Shall Escape is filmed partly from the position of the German gunners, and the Allied team in Play Dirty meet so many hardships that one begins to feel the filmmaker is enjoying their fate. Tight, intense montages like the one in None Shall Escape recur in Ramrod (1947), in which a ranch burns in the surprise arson that begins the film's range war, and Last of the Comanches (1952), in a brief, quietly spectacular montage of a retreating band of six soldiers. Preparing to stop for the night, they're depicted in near silhouette against the sky; their featureless figures diminishing their individuality, they're represented as the pursuing Comanche might see them: as the faceless enemy.
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De Toth’s taut and virulent anti-Nazi drama is, in a sense, futuristic—made and released during World War II, but set after the end of the war. None Shall Escape was the first film to consider the eventual trial of Nazi war criminals. Screenwriter Lester Cole and leading lady Hunt would both soon be blacklisted.
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De Toth then went to England, where he worked for Alexander Korda as second-unit director on The Thief Of Bagdad (1940), and on to Hollywood for Jungle Book (1942). The following year he made his American debut as director with a quickie from the Lone Wolf detective series. This was followed by a number of unconvincing, but economically directed, melodramas - Dark Waters, a psychological thriller with Merle Oberon; None Shall Escape, a vigorous anti-Nazi tract (both 1944); and The Other Love (1947), a soppy soap opera starring Barbara Stanwyck as a concert pianist dying of TB. They were all indistinguishable from much other studio fare of the decade.
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Better known to film buffs than to the general public, de Toth made more than 40 pictures, including None Shall Escape (1943), Pitfall (1948), The Gunfighter (1950), and Day of the Outlaw (1959). He was admired by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino for his subtle and disturbing psychological effects and his frank depictions of violence and raw human emotions.
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