The Search (1948)

The Search is a moving and compassionate portrayal of childhood during wartime. It was filmed on location and shows a sliver of postwar life in a German city that was reduced to rubble during World War II. If the film had been shot in color instead of black and white, its location shots probably wouldn’t look any different from the scenes on the nightly news today about the war in Ukraine.

The story in The Search starts in a semidocumentary style with a voice-over narrator in a partially bombed-out train station in an unnamed German city. (The actual location was Nuremberg.) The female voice-over narrator (who I believe is Aline MacMahon, who plays Mrs. Murray) explains a little bit about the children arriving at the station and their plight. The most important point she makes is this: “The war is over, but want and suffering have not come to an end in Europe.” Rebuilding would take years, and it’s a detail that I recall being glossed over in the history books that I read as a child learning about World War II. Perhaps the United States could go right back to normal life in 1945, but Europe and Russia didn’t have that luxury.

(This article about The Search contains some spoilers.)

The refugee children, who come from all over Europe, are met by United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) personnel. They are ushered into an interviewing room, and a few example interviews are presented. Children from France, Poland, and Hungary explain their short history and life experience. All of them are heart-wrenching, but one in particular is especially sad: A young girl explains being forced into slave labor at a concentration camp, where she sorted clothing taken from prisoners burned at the crematorium. While doing this work, she found her mother’s clothes.

Karel Malik, from Czechoslovakia, is also part of this large group of orphaned, homeless, frightened children. He doesn’t speak except to say, “I don’t know.” A flashback explains to viewers his identity and his circumstances during the war. Another boy with him is a friend who looks after him. They are inseparable, and when one decides to run away because the children fear that they are being taken back to the concentration camps, the other follows.

In a separate narrative thread, Karel’s mother Hanna is still searching for her son. She and other survivors walk along parallel roads built by the Germans (which Eisenhower would later replicate in the highway system in the United States). Many survivors walk these roads, looking for family members. She learns that her husband and daughter were murdered, and she can find no trace of her son Karel. Neither Hanna nor Karel knows what happened to the other. The two stories are told separately but with some overlap because Mrs. Malik arrives at the UNRAA center where her son first arrived. They don’t meet right away because Karel had already run away by the time his mother had arrived.

Karel finds Steve Stevenson, a U.S. soldier sitting in a jeep and eating a sandwich. Karel approaches cautiously because he is still so fearful, but his hunger makes him desperate. Steve tosses his half-eaten sandwich to Karel, then leaves another whole sandwich for him. Steve turns his jeep around; catches Karel when he scrambles for the food; and brings him back to his billet, which is a house that survived the Allied bombing. Karel cannot remember much, not even his name, so Steve starts calling him Jim.

Steve wants to do all he can for Karel and takes him under his wing. He teaches him English, feeds and houses him, and attempts to find any of his family or relatives. He gradually becomes attached to him and would rather bring him home to the United States than leave him in Germany. Steve and his commanding officer Jerry Fisher find a number tattooed on Karel’s arm: A 24328. Now they know that he was once a prisoner at Auschwitz. Steve writes to UNRRA Central Tracing Bureau, asking them to find surviving relatives of a boy with the number A 24328. The title of the film could apply to Steve’s search on Karel’s behalf and to Hanna Malik’s search for her son, the only other member of her immediate family to have survived the war.

The Search is a 1948 Swiss-American film that could very easily belong in many categories: film noir, drama, rubble film (or Trümmerfilm). I’m not a big stickler about categories to begin with, and putting the film into all three wouldn’t bother me in the least. I have seen The Search several times, and it seems to be more poignant with repeat viewings. Did I miss some details the first time? Was it just too difficult to take in all the misery, even though the film is fictional? I enjoy seeing postwar films shot on location, but the rubble films are especially difficult. These types of film are history lessons about what life was like at the time, and it’s not an easy topic to sell as entertainment.

According to Wikipedia,  rubble films were “made directly after World War II [and dealt] with the impact of the battles in the countries at the center of the war. The style was mostly used by filmmakers in the rebuilding film industries of Eastern Europe, Italy, and the former Nazi Germany. The style is characterized by its use of location exteriors among the ‘rubble’ of bombed-down cities to bring the gritty, depressing reality of the lives of the civilian survivors in those early years.”

The Search in particular is firmly rooted in its time period. By that, I mean that postwar viewers would have known why U.S. soldiers and officers were stationed in Europe after the war ended and would have understood the backstory for the main characters that is assumed in the film. The film also uses terms and abbreviations that viewers at the time would have known and understood, but that’s not true for viewers in 2023. Here are a couple of examples (click on each for more detailed explanations at Wikipedia):

◊ International Refugee Organization (IRO)

◊ United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA)

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also has a page devoted to UNRAA. Click here for more information.

Montgomery Clift gives a great performance as the compassionate U.S. soldier Steve who wants to take care of the young boy he meets in the rubble. Wendell Corey plays his commanding officer, and the two of them have a couple of conversations that briefly summarize the predicament that many U.S. army personnel found themselves in at the time: They are surrounded by misery and desperation, and they want to help in any way they can. But they can help the most people if they try to keep their personal feelings out of the work and carry on every day doing what they were sent to Europe to do.

The greatest performance is from the young boy who plays Karel Malik: Ivan Jandl. According to Wikipedia, he knew no English before being chosen for this role. He gives an amazing performance, and it’s heartbreaking to think that such a young child, the actor himself, could probably base his character on his own experiences.

March 23, 1948, release date  •  Directed by Fred Zinnemann  •  Screenplay by Richard Schweizer, David Wechsler, Paul Jarrico, Montgomery Clift, Betty Smith  •  Music by Robert Blum  •  Edited by Hermann Haller  •  Cinematography by Emil Berna

Montgomery Clift as Ralph (“Steve”) Stevenson  •  Aline MacMahon as Mrs. Murray  •  Jarmila Novotná as Mrs. Hanna Malik  •  Wendell Corey as Jerry Fisher  •  Ivan Jandl as Karel (“Jim”) Malik  •  Mary Patton as Mrs. Fisher  •  Ewart G. Morrison as Mr. Crookes  •  William Rogers as Tom Fisher  •  Leopold Borkowski as Joel Markowsky  •  Claude Gambier as Raoul Dubois  •  Fred Zinneman as the interpreter

Distributed by Loew’s International, Inc.  •  Produced by Praesens-Film, Zurich, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer