An interesting film. It begins with a shot of clouds, and a voiceover warning us about the behaviour of uncivilised human beings. It ends with a camera in a house, finding places where people were, hearing their voices. It's also tense, dramatic, dark, most worthy, proud, true and imbued with a spirit of doomed love.
It's 1940, and there was huge resistance in America to entering a Second World War. And yet MGM had the courage to make an 'A' picture that dealt with the effect Hitler was having on Germany and wider Europe, and the dangers of Nazism, how citizens of a country seemed brainwashed (and as Q sagely remarked, if you look at the USA today, there's something similar happening).
Written by Claudine West, Andersen Ellis and George Froeschel, based on a novel by Phyllis Bottome, a most interesting lady, who had married a station head of MI6, studied psychology in Vienna, then started some kind of progressive school in Austria where Ian Fleming was a pupil. She wrote the novel whilst living in Germany in the late thirties.
Great cast includes James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan (good), Frank Morgan (good), Robert Young (good), Robert Stack, Bonita Granville, Maria Ouspenskaya, Irene Rich, William Orr, Gene Reynolds, Ward Bond. And, for some reason uncredited, Rudolph Anders as the thoroughly nasty Nazi.
Music Edward Kane, photography William Daniels, editing Elmo Veron, art direction Cedric Gibbons.
According to Time Out's Tom Milne 'almost the entire film was directed, uncredited, by Victor Saville', though I can't substantiate that. Most unusually, there's no music over the end credits.
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