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"Somewhere in Europe" and deep in the Hollywood studio, Jean Renoir's pensive dislocation as distinct from the palpable terror of Lang (Hangmen also Die!) and Sirk (Hitler's Madman). The swastika flag unfurls over the anonymous hamlet's City Hall, Occupied France by any other name, "shake hands, make the best of it." Oppression is to be endured or countered, a lesson for the schoolteacher (Charles Laughton) leading a timorous life smothered by his mother (Una O'Connor) and smitten with a bold colleague (Maureen O'Hara). Nazi rule demands the gutting of books, the protagonist complies only to find illicit literature slipped under his front door, a pamphlet titled Liberty. His beloved's fiancé (George Sanders) is a collaborationist and her brother (Kent Smith) a resister, the old professor (Philip Merivale) is branded a radical while the kommandant (Walter Slezak) strives to give fascism a reasonable face. Cowering in the bomb shelter, the protagonist comes to tower in the courtroom. "It's very easy to talk about heroism in the free countries. But it's hard to talk about it here, where our people are starving." Didactic agitprop as an exile's expressive exorcism, sententious Dudley Nichols speechifying enlarged by Renoir in pockets of tangled human verity. Weakness and strength, docility and engagement, simplistic lines smudged throughout. The train depot from La Bête Humaine is abstracted as puffs of locomotive smoke glimpsed through the window of the superintendent's office, Hamer re-stages the pursuit across railroad tracks in It Always Rains on Sunday. "I see now that sabotage is the only weapon left to a defeated people." A reminder of the Revolution brings it all to a close, the classroom having been properly recognized as a battlefield. Truffaut pays oblique tribute in Fahrenheit 451. With Thurston Hall, George Coulouris, Ivan F. Simpson, and Nancy Gates. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |