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A prayer disturbed by bullets, the quintessence of Frank Borzage's view of war as an intrusion on sacred emotional zones. "Present sorrows" in Vichy France, the village convent doubles as orphanage, Mother Superior (Lucile Watson) matches wits with Nazi kommandant (Konstantin Shayne). "One is never through with the Germans." "That is what our gardener says about the blight that attacks our roses, but we must struggle against it just the same." The mayor (Walter Slezak) trembles before such would-be conquerors, elsewhere an innkeeper assesses them as "lonely, homesick, and hated." The crisis at hand involves a downed American pilot (Ray Milland), helping him escape forces the cloistered novice (Barbara Britton) into the world she's long feared. "Remember, you're a soldier now." The awakening of commitment and the morality of resistance, the position from The Mortal Storm picked right back up. Filmed amid doves in her element, the young nun faces her mission as a continuation of her education as well as a darkening expansion of her perspective—she walks toward murky terrain in a tracking shot that follows an ascending view of the doyenne's lifeless body. "That is conscience." Chasteness pervades the fugitive couple's trek, a caress carries a purified charge, at one point she lays her head against his chest to conceal a bloodied spot from Gestapo officers. The guise of matrimony triggers yearning for the real thing, the aviator remembers his beloved in hushed tones promptly recognized by the heroine: "Someone who makes an empty house a home, and a home a haven." "You say it like a litany." Grenade on belt and crucifix in fist, capped by Borzage in the finale with a remarkable close-up of expiring body and exultant spirit. Melville's Le Silence de la Mer suggests a study of the delicate technique. With Vladimir Sokoloff, Mona Freeman, William Edmunds, George Davis, and Marguerite d'Alvarez. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |