Nazism is evil, but there are many different ways of portraying evil. The col­laboration between two men who shared Russian Jewish heritage – director Lewis Milestone and writer Robert Rossen – approached Nazism in the Norwegian resistance drama Edge of Darkness as systematic bullying and an outright ex­ploitative cult. Together, they created a two-fisted piece of agit-prop in which there is no trace of banality.
In the 1940s, there was no more committed or angrier anti-fascist in American cinema than Rossen who here penned a film without heroes. In their place, he sketched a large group of fight­ers (including Warner stars Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan), collaborators, and those who fell into the shades in between. Milestone, for his part, was not con­cerned with realism but aimed for max­imum emotional impact, creating a film carried by an inner syncopation. With a style remarkably close to Soviet cinema, the film’s modernity – its stylised track­ing shots and use of the zoom lens – feels closer today to the work of Miklós Jancsó than to typical war films of the 40s.
Set two and a half years after the oc­cupation of Norway, the film opens with a nightmarish sequence: the arrival of a German troop in a coastal village where they discover that the entire local popu­lation and the occupying German army have been massacred. The only survivor, a local capitalist collaborator turned madman, wanders the scene, claim­ing ownership of the corpses. He is shot within seconds. The film then unfolds in flashback, chronicling the formation of the local resistance. Some of the fight­ers are introduced in an extremely for­malist manner – gestural (shown while living their daily life), Brechtian (with the camera taking the helm to introduce them), and rhythmic, with their move­ments syncopated to music. The film, with its affirmation of collective action, ends with President Roosevelt’s Look to Norway speech. For two hours, it main­tains an unshakable sense of momentum – no frills in its depiction of the path from passive resistance to suicidal glory.

Ehsan Khoshbakht