Despite its grim subject matter – in Nazi-occupied Marseilles, two escaped British POWs (Stephen Boyd and Tony Wright) hide out in the Old Port district at the same time a homicidal maniac (James Robertson Justice) preys on refugees by promising passage out of the country but killing them and keeping their assets – Seven Thunders (aka The Beasts of Marseilles) is one of Fregonese’s most optimistic and exuberant films.
As typically itinerant Fregonese protagonists, Boyd and Wright at first feel imprisoned in the cramped quarters of the old city but soon learn to negotiate its web of hidden passages and underground connections. Boyd finds a new sense of freedom with the help of a perky gamine (Anna Gaylor), while Wright is protected by a cockney dowager (beloved British character actor Kathleen Harrison) improbably transplanted to France. After Apache Drums and The Raid, this British production is yet another Fregonese film that ends with an explosion of apocalyptic violence, though this time the destruction is based on an actual incident – the dynamiting of the Old Port in January 1943 by the Nazis. Fregonese’s treatment of this sequence is exemplary, seamlessly blending location, studio and newsreel footage. For all the horror of destruction, the dynamiting also forces the killer from his dark lair and propels the protagonists into an appealingly vague, open-air future.

Dave Kehr