This is a movie with a noble heart and fine actors. Unfortunately, it is also a movie with a stiff and leaden script, painfully unnatural and not well directed. It is impossible not to feel for Paul Lukas' character, just as it is impossible not to feel for Paul Heinried's character in Casablanca, made the same year and dealing with similar issues. But whereas the script in Casablanca, one of that movie's many wonders, makes real people of its characters, the script in this movie fails miserably in that respect, as in others.
If you have never seen this movie, watch it. But it could have been so much better with a better script.
-----------------------
I watched this movie again tonight, 9 years after I wrote my review above. In rereading that, I find the tone is perhaps too harsh, but I do not regret my condemnation of the movie's script. The characters are very noble indeed, but they remain ideological figures rather than human beings. Perhaps the best illustration of that is seen by a comparison of Paul Luckas' Kurt with Victor Lazlo in *Casablanca*. Lazlo, too, is self-sacrificing and noble, but he is allowed to be more human, and therefore more sympathetic, than Luckas' resistance fighter. The latter's final speech is very moving, but he still seems a cold fish.
There are also problems of construction. Martha and David are never really woven into the main story.
Again, the movie is worth watching. It must have been very powerful in 1943, when it was released, and resistance fighters were desperately trying to counter a successful Hitler in Europe. But the characters are too two-dimensional to make this a truly moving film
If you have never seen this movie, watch it. But it could have been so much better with a better script.
-----------------------
I watched this movie again tonight, 9 years after I wrote my review above. In rereading that, I find the tone is perhaps too harsh, but I do not regret my condemnation of the movie's script. The characters are very noble indeed, but they remain ideological figures rather than human beings. Perhaps the best illustration of that is seen by a comparison of Paul Luckas' Kurt with Victor Lazlo in *Casablanca*. Lazlo, too, is self-sacrificing and noble, but he is allowed to be more human, and therefore more sympathetic, than Luckas' resistance fighter. The latter's final speech is very moving, but he still seems a cold fish.
There are also problems of construction. Martha and David are never really woven into the main story.
Again, the movie is worth watching. It must have been very powerful in 1943, when it was released, and resistance fighters were desperately trying to counter a successful Hitler in Europe. But the characters are too two-dimensional to make this a truly moving film