Tag: Gene Lockhart

All That Money Can Buy (1941)

The Devil sure knows how to tempt a man in this beautifully filmed morality tale

Director: William Dieterle

Cast: Walter Huston (Mr Scratch), Edward Arnold (Daniel Webster), James Craig (Jabez Stone), Anne Shirley (Mary Stone), Jane Darwell (Ma Stone), Simone Simon (Belle), Gene Lockhart (Squire Slossum), John Qualen (Miser Stevens), HB Warner (Judge Hawthorne)

Sometimes life can be a real struggle. With debts, failed crops and animals getting sick, what’s a guy to do? That’s the problem New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone (James Craig) has in 1840. What he wouldn’t give to find a bundle of buried gold that could solve all his problems. Fortunately, charming old rogue Mr Scratch (Walter Huston) knows exactly where to find one – all he wants in return is for Jabez to sign away his soul seven years from now (signed in blood of course). Jabez gets fortune, prestige, the son he always wanted – but when ‘Mr Scratch’ comes to collect, can Jabez’s friend, famed orator, lawyer and congressmen Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) save his soul?

All That Money Can Buy is a richly atmospheric piece of film-making from William Dieterle, adapted from Stephen Vincent Benet’s short story and full of gorgeously filmed light-and-shadow with a haunting score by Bernard Herrmann. (The story was originally titled The Devil and Daniel Webster, also the film’s original title before RKO changed it to avoid confusion with their more successful Jean Arthur comedy The Devil and Miss Jones.) It’s a neat morality tale, full of dark delight at the devilish ingenuity of Mr Scratch, with lots of dark enjoyment at seeing a weak-but-decent man corrupted into being exactly the type of greedy, cheating cad to whom he was deeply in debt to from the beginning.

It’s nominally about James Craig’s Jabez Stone, but Jabez is a shallow, easily manipulated passenger in his own life, pushed and pulled towards and away from sin depending on who he’s talking to. Stone’s fall is swift: moments after meeting Scratch, he’s digging hungrily into a meal while his wife and mother say grace, hugging his newfound bag of gold. As his wealth goes, he drifts from his pure wife (Anne Shirley, effective in a dull part) becoming easy prey for demonic (literally) temptress Belle (a wonderfully seductive Simone Simon). By the time the seven years are up, he’s skipping church for illicit card games and crushing the farms of his neighbours to fund his dreamhouse-on-a-hill.

Stone is really the Macguffin here. The real focus is the big-name rivals: The Devil and Daniel Webster. It’s implied these two have fought a long-running battle for years: our introduction to Webster sees him scribbling literally in the shadow of Mr Scratch, who whispers to him tempting offers of high office. Later Webster is unflustered when Scratch suddenly appears to place a coat on his shoulders, treating him as familiar rival. You could argue Scratch is only prowling the streets of New Hampshire because he’s looking for a way to nail the soul of his real target, Daniel Webster.

As Mr Scratch, the film has a delightful (Oscar-nominated) performance from Walter Huston. With his scruffy clothes and twirling his cane, Scratch pops up everywhere with Huston’s devilish smile. It’s a masterclass in insinuating, playful malevolence, with Huston playing this larger-than-life character in a surprisingly low-key way that nevertheless sees him overflowing with delight at his own wickedness. Huston has the trick of making Scratch sound like someone trying to sound sincere, while never leaving us in doubt that everything he says is a trap or lie, only showing his arrogance and cruelty when victory is in his grasp. It’s a fabulous performance, charismatic and wicked.

Edward Arnold makes Daniel Webster both a grand man of principle and a consummate politician, proud of his reputation and all the more open to temptation for it. He also has the absolute assurance of a man used to getting his own way, and the arrogance of seeing himself as an equal to the Devil rather than a target. These two form the ends of a push-me-pull-me rivalry.

The rivalry culminates in its famous ‘courtroom’ scene, as Webster – a little the worse for drink –argues for Jabez’s soul in front of a ghostly court of American sinners from the bowels of hell (lead among them Benedict Arnold). Its shot in atmospheric smoke, with the double exposure creating a ghostly effect for jury and judge. It’s another excellent touch in a film full of inventive use of effects and camerawork, Dieterle at the height of his German influences. The artificial New Hampshire scenery is shot with a sun-kissed beauty that bears Murnau’s mark. Striking lighting and smoke-play abounds in Joseph H August’s camerawork, not least Belle’s introduction backlit with an extraordinarily bright fire. Early scenes of Stone’s misfortune interrupted by a brief frames of a photo-negative Scratch laughing, quite the chillingly surrealist effect.

Politically, All That Money Can Buy backs away from any overt criticism of Webster’s support for the Missouri Compromise (this key piece of slavery protection legislation is so key to Webster’s view of American strength he’s even named a horse after it). But it’s quite brave for 1941 in allowing the Devil legitimate criticism of America’s ‘original sins’ saying he was there driving on the seizing of the land from the Native Americans and up on deck on the first slave ship from the Congo. (Especially as Webster can’t defend these actions). It’s also interesting that the film praises collectivism for the farmers over rugged individualism, a conclusion it’s hard to imagine being praised a few years later.

All That Money Can Buy is also filled with impressive practical effects, not least Scatch’s impossible catching of an axe thrown towards him, bursting it into frame. Both Scratch and Bell reduce papers to flaming ashes with a flick of the wrist. Horribly woozy soft-focus camera work accompanies Jabez’s nightmare visions of the damned. It’s tightly and skilfully edited, superbly paced, with montages used effectively for transitions (a field of corn growing is particularly striking) and wildly unnerving sequences, like Scratch’s fast-paced barn-dance with its whirligig of movement and repeated shots. It’s all brilliantly scored by Herrmann, from the pastoral beats of New Hampshire to the discordant sounds (some created from telephone wires) that accompany Scratch.

All That Money Can Buy concludes with a stand-out speech from Webster that perhaps settles matters a little too easily – and brushes away any of the film’s mild criticism of America’s past with a relentlessly upbeat patriotic message. But the journey there – and the performances from a superb Huston and excellent Arnold – is masterfully assembled by a crack production team working under a director at the height of his powers. A flop at the time, few films deserve rediscovery more.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Warm Christmas fable will make you want to believe in Santa all over again

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Maureen O’Hara (Doris Walker), John Payne (Fred Gailey), Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle), Natalie Wood (Susan Walker), Gene Lockhart (Judge Henry X Harper), Porter Hall (Granville Sawyer), William Frawley (Charlie Halloran), Jerome Cowan (DA Thomas Mara), Philip Tonge (Julian Shellhammer), Henry Antrim (RH Macy), Thelma Ritter (Peter’s mother)

Santa Claus is a sweet little story we were told as kids, all part of buying into the magic of Christmas. How can we have been so silly as to think a jolly fat man with a red coat and flying reindeer delivered our Christmas presents? It’s the sort of fantasy adults are primed to burst like an over-inflated balloon. As a tribute to the earnest joy of believing in childish things, Miracle on 34^th Street should also be the sort of thing the adult in us can’t wait to mock. Instead, its warmth and good-natured sweetness carries you along and makes you want to believe.

It’s the build-up to Christmas, and Macy’s in New York is working overtime to bring the magic to its customers (and turn a tidy profit). Macy’s Day Parade director Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) is relieved when Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) takes the place of a drunken parade Santa and then occupies Santa’s Grotto in the store. Kringle is exactly the sort of guy you picture when you think of Santa – and, on top of that, claims to be Santa himself, much to the discomfort of Doris who doesn’t believe in all that stuff and certainly doesn’t want her daughter Susan (Natalie Wood) to. But when Kringle finds himself in court, fighting against being committed to an institution, with only Doris’ boyfriend Fred Gailey (John Payne) to defend him, can he prove there is a Santa Claus and it’s him?

Seaton’s film is an adorable delight which is funny and good-natured enough to avoid the trapdoor of sickly sentimentality. It’s a film about adults getting back in touch with the giddy delight of believing childish things. It flags up every cynical objection – and then gently suggests we’d be happier forgetting them. After all, what’s the harm in allowing ourselves in a few harmless flights of fancy – why should everything be measurable? Kris Kringle comes up against the hard-headed: harried mothers, businessmen, judges and lawyers and wins them over with his genuineness and warmth. He makes people want to believe – and doesn’t that, in a way, make him Santa?

It helps a huge amount that Edmund Gwenn is perfectly cast. Piling on the pounds and facial hair, Gwenn looks the part but also is the part. His performance is kind, considerate and bursting with warmth and good cheer. In a performance full of light, unforced playfulness, Gwenn gets the level of sweetness just right. A squeeze or two more and you would choke on the schmaltz of the whole conceit: but Gwenn is so adorable the audience wants to believe in him as much as the characters.

Especially as this Santa melts some of the cold commercialism of our modern Christmas. Miracle on 34^th Street has a lot of good-natured fun at how Kris confounds the latent money-making of Christmas. On hire he’s instructed to memorise a list of preferred products to push on children. Instead he points mothers towards competing stores where they can get the exact gift they want or pick up better quality goods than at Macy’s. Of course, the concept proves so popular with customers that RH Macy is confounded by the goodwill it creates in his customers (and the huge sales it will lead to from their loyalty). Even other department stores start doing the same.

It’s one of the recurrent themes of the film: Kris brings out the best in people. Maybe not always for the right reasons: the shop-owners who want money, the judge who wants re-election. But it shows what benefit a little bit of good can have in the world. Kris also shows how little touches of consideration can change lives. There is a truly heart-warming moment where Kringle meets a Dutch orphan who simply wanted to meet Santa – although her adopted mother warned her Santa can’t speak Dutch. Much to her surprise, Kris launches into fluent Dutch, to the delight of the child. Miracle on 34 Street has several moments where the unstudied delight of children is captured to great effect, not least Natalie Wood’s delighted response to discovering the reality of Kringle’s beard (it also, to be fair, has several fairly cloying child actors).

Eventually the forces of darkness – led by Porter Hall’s twitch-laden store “psychologist”, whose bullying self-importance makes him the only person Kringle dislikes – insist we all put away childish things and chuck Kringle in an asylum. Miracle on 34^th Street segues into a Capra-esque court-room drama (it’s hard not to detect touches of Mr Deeds Goes to Town) which pits Kringle’s home-spun honesty against legal cold professionalism. The clash becomes a delightful headache, as both the Judge and DA confront outraged children at home who can’t believe they are putting Santa on trial. It’s a great gag: who wants to be the judge who rules categorically Santa does not exist?

Alongside these gently amusing courtroom shenanigans (with John Payne doing an excellent job as Kris’ inventive lawyer) the film balances an endearing domestic plot. There is the inevitable will-they-won’t-they between Payne and O’Hara (if there is a bit of slack you need to cut the film today, it’s in Fred’s pushy wooing of Doris, including corralling Susan). But also, can O’Hara’s all-business professional, who’s raised her daughter with a Gradgrindish obsession with facts, melt her heart and allow both of them to believe a little bit? O’Hara handles this softening with all the consummate skill of a gifted light-comedian, while Gwenn’s delightful interaction with Wood’s precocious Susan, keen to access a world of imagination she’s never really known, is perfectly done.

it becomes a film about the power of believing. In our modern age we become expected to only base decisions on cold hard facts. Doris has taught her daughter to doubt imagination as a weakness to protect her from disappointment in the world (she is after all divorced, quite daring for a 40s family drama). But its also made Susan less likely to invest in faith, to open herself up to hopes and dreams. Its recapturing the ability to believe in something and be enriched by it that becomes one of the film’s richest messages.

It would be incredibly easy to poke fun at the good-natured naivety of Miracle on 34^th Street, where businessmen are money-focused-but-decent and lawyers are amiably ready to indulge Kris with a smile. But it’s a film that zeroes in on an in-built nostalgia for simpler times in all of us. We’ve all been little Susan, sitting in a car desperately wanting to believe in the magical. It’s a film that demonstrates the eventual emptiness of cynicism, encouraging the audience to just put all that aside for 90 minutes and remember what it was like to be a child again. Throw in with that Edmund Gwenn as the definitive Santa and it might just be one of the greatest Christmas films ever made.

His Girl Friday (1940)

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant bicker and spar in His Girl Friday, one of the all-time classics I’ve never quite clicked with

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: Cary Grant (Walter Burns), Rosalind Russell (Hildy Johnson), Ralph Bellamy (Bruce Baldwin), Gene Lockhart (Sheriff Hartwell), Porter Hall (Murphy), Ernest Truex (Bensinger), Cliff Edwards (Endicott), Clarence Kolb (The Mayor), Roscoe Karns (McCue), Frank Jenks (Wilson), Regis Toomey (Sanders), Abner Biberman (Louie), Frank Orth (Duffy), John Qualen (Earl Williams), Helen Mack (Mollie Mallot)

There’s always one film classic that the world and his dog love to bits, but every time you watch it you just don’t get it. That classic for me is His Girl Friday. I’m not sure many films have appeared more than this one on film buffs’ lists of Top Ten Movies of All Time, but while I admire its many, many qualities, every time I’ve watched it – and it’s at least three now – I just don’t love it. More to the point I don’t find it funny (I know, I know I can practically hear your jaws hitting the floor), neither do I engage with or root for its lead characters (please don’t hit me). I admire a lot of things about this film and how it is made. And I chuckle from time to time when I watch it. But for some reason even I’m not sure of, I’ve got no click with this film. Compared to The Awful Truth or The Lady Eve or The Philadelphia Story (all films this bears a lot of comparison with) I just don’t feel it.

It’s an adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page. In quite a modern touch, one of its lead characters is gender flipped. In the play, a newspaper editor tries to persuade his star reporter not to quit the game: in His Girl Friday the star reporter not only becomes a woman but, don’t you know it, the ex-wife of the editor, about to walk out (in more ways than one) to marry her dull fiancé. Cary Grant (who else?) is the fast-talking editor Walter Burns, Rosalind Russell the fast-talking star reporter Hildy Johnson. In fact, everyone is fast-talking, in the film that holds the world record for dialogue speed. Can Burns persuade Hildy to hold off leaving with fiancée Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy – sportingly playing up to his dull reputation) for one more day so she can cover the story of strangely naïve convict Earl Williams (John Qualen)? Let the madness ensue.

Let’s focus on all the good stuff first. Not least because my general lack of connection to a film loved by all and sundry is so personal, it almost defies analysis. Hawks was, rumour has it, won round to the idea of gender-swapping Hildy by hosting a read-through of the play at a dinner party with a shortage of people, meaning Hildy was read by a woman. That opened up a host of ideas around combining this with the classic re-marriage genre and bang away we go. It is, needless to say, a brilliant idea and adds such a spark to every single interaction between the two characters that it distinctly improves the play (later productions have often carried the idea – and the dialogue – across from this film).

On top of this, Hawks wanted to make this the fastest talking comedy film ever made. And boy does he succeed at that. The dialogue of this film is delivered with such rat-a-tat speed that clock watchers report it hits a rate of over 300 words a minute (try reading that many words out in one minute to see how fast that is). It gives the film a ferocious manic energy and thunder-cracker momentum and keeps the punchlines coming fast. It also needs gifted actors, which it sure-as-hell gets here. Grant possibly hits his comedic peak here, managing to still remain suave, cool and collected, even as he’s ripping through words and shifting verbal goalposts at dazzling speed. This is also Russell’s career highlight, embodying the image of the sort of spunky, arch and no-nonsense professional woman of screwball comedy that all others (even Hepburn) are measured against.

They race through a film that makes excellent use of long-takes, intelligent single-shot camera moves and careful, intelligent editing to highlight the electric speed of the zany dialogue. In particular, Hawks makes a brilliant motif of telephones (those old candlestick phones), which characters are forever hurling instructions down, using as escape tools from awkward moments and juggling conversations with (either from multiple phones or between the phone and people in the room). They are used for short, sharp, punchy lines – and it fits a film that is all momentum and short-hand. The ultra-smart, quotable banter, littered with one-liners, is the ultimate epitome of the popular style of dialogue at the time, which favoured this style over the speeches and deeper content that was seen as more of the preserve of theatre.

Walter and Hildy in this version also become the epitome of “the screwball couple”. The divorced partners who of course still love each other, largely because they recognise that no-one else will share their insane energy and obsession. Not to mention that fighting and feuding with their intellectual equal is a million times sexier (and better foreplay) than a thousand dinners at home with someone average will ever be. Ralph Bellamy does good work here (essentially, like Grant, repeating his role from The Awful Truth) as that dull, trusting man – the only one in the film who vaguely resembles a human being and therefore, obviously, the character the audience likes the least (who goes to the cinema to see someone like themselves on the screen, eh?)

There is so much right about His Girl Friday. The actors are sublime, the dialogue delivered perfectly, Hawks’ direction is pin-point in its mix of old-Hollywood classicism, and it’s very well shot. So why don’t I like it more? It’s that most personal feeling: I just don’t find it funny enough. Maybe that’s because I need to connect with characters more – and I don’t connect with Hildy and Walter. In some ways I don’t even like them. His Girl Friday is frequently an unapologetically cruel film: Hildy and Walter treat several people like crap, largely for their own amusement or as collateral damage in their own war of foreplay. At one point a desperate, lonely woman attempts suicide (she jumps out of a damn window falling a couple of floors) – Hildy and Walter are joking about it in seconds. They are cold, self-obsessed people and for all their superficial charm, there isn’t any touch of warmth to them at all. They are very artificial people in an artificial world. In all, I don’t really like them and I find it hard to careor want them back together (other than recognising that they deserve each other).

Believe me, I understand some comedy is cruel, I don’t have a problem with that. But I don’t think His Girl Friday realises it’s that kind of film. The Awful Truth has a very similar plot – but that had its characters recognise their own faults and also gave us reasons to care for them as human beings. His Girl Friday doesn’t do either of those things, meaning I laughed a lot in The Awful Truth and not so much in His Girl Friday.

Can you still bear to read on after such blasphemy? But there you go. Everyone has that stone-cold classic that they just can’t get on board with. This film is mine. I respect so much about it, but it neither tickles my funny bone nor makes me feel welcomed. I find it a cold and cruelly minded film, that looks down on people with scorn – from Bruce to criminal Earl Williams and most especially to his distraught girlfriend Molly – and invites us to do the same. It wants us to love the popular kids in the class and join them in spitting paper balls at the losers. This doesn’t do it for me. I know everyone loves it. Hell, I know I’m probably wrong. But I just don’t love His Girl Friday.

Going My Way (1944)

Bing Crosby wins hearts and minds in the sentimental Best Picture winner Going My Way

Director: Leo McCarey

Cast: Bing Crosby (Father Chuck O’Malley), Barry Fitzgerald (Father Fitzgibbon), Frank McHugh (Father Timothy O’Dowd), Rise Stevens (Genevieve Linden/Jenny Tuffel), James Brown (Ted Haines Jr), Gene Lockhart (Ted Haines Snr), Jean Heather (Carol James), Porter Hall (Mr Belknap), Fortunio Bonanova (Tomaso Bozani), Eily Malyon (Mrs Carmody)

“Schmaltz isn’t selling” record producers tell Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby) when he pitches them the little ditty he’s penned to raise funds to save his church from financial ruin. Well no one told the producers of this film: and just as well, as this became one of the most successful films of the 1940s, raking in buckets of cash and armfuls of Oscars. Watching it today, you’d hardly believe it – but that’s to forget the stress and fear of a nation at war, or that Bing Crosby (in a tailor-made role) was practically the most popular human being alive. For all that, watching Going My Way today won’t challenge you at all – other than perhaps your patience.

Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby) arrives in a (allegedly) rough neighbourhood in New York. He’s to take over the parish from the ageing Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald) but, gosh darn it, Father Bing doesn’t have the heart to tell Father Fitzgibbon that, so pretends to be his new curate. Promptly, Father Bing sets about solving all the problems of the parish with his charming homespun wisdom, decency, empathy and ability to bond with all. Gosh darn it, before you know what’s happened he’s turned the rough-and-tumble local boys from larcenists into an all-male choir and has roped in an old friend (who just happens to be the lead singer at the MET Opera) to give him and the boys the stage to sing a few of his songs and help save the church.

Yup, Going My Way is exactly that sort of film, and your enjoyment of it is going to be inversely proportional to how quickly being dipped in pure schmaltz brings you out in hives. This film is sickly sweet in its cozy comfort, a reassuring view of a world straight out of Enid Blyton, where the priest has all the answers, the hearts of businessmen can be melted by a few wise words, and dropping a few sporting references can win over the local ‘tough’ kids.

Going My Way is so homely and quaint, it makes Capra feel positively edgy. In fact, it lacks any of the energy, wit and style Capra brings to his pictures. That lack of buzz doesn’t help it, the languid pace drawing your attention all the more to its overbearing decency and careful weeding out of anything that could even cause a scintilla of doubt.

Instead it’s a warm gentle hug – and a hug that takes a great deal of time (at just two hours, it can seem like it’s going on forever). There are fewer songs in it than you might expect – only one every 10-15 minutes max. Often very little happens – and when it does, drama is very far from the agenda. Instead every problem is solved with consummate ease (it just needs Father Bing to open people’s eyes). Everyone is at heart decent in the extreme: the local tough kids have more high spirits than hooliganism to them, the (very) Irish women have stern exteriors but soft hearts, and the ruthless businessman is a devoted family man. After a while, I felt my patience being sorely tested.

In the middle of this, we get Bing Crosby, who won an Oscar for his work here. It’s a part tailor-made for Bing. In fact, so much so, that he essentially turns O’Malley into a dog-collar wearing version of his own stage persona, with touches of wry humour, whimsy and an affectionate smile. It’s no mean thing creating an entire persona – or performing it – but it feels a little rich to win an Oscar for it. O’Malley is of course perfect, a man free of any blemish who backs humbly into the limelight. A liberal who thinks Church should be fun (though far from a radical), there is nothing to cast even a shadow of doubt on his perfection: his flirtation with a girl never went so far as a date, he has the patience of a saint and he always knows exactly what to say to everyone.

He even wears down the defensiveness of Barry Fitzgerald’s Father Fitzgibbon. Fitzgerald also won an Oscar (for Supporting Actor) and effectively created the cinematic template for what an Irish priest is like. Fitzgibbon is bumbling with a sing-song whimsy, stuck-in-his-ways but basically decent, a touch prickly but also vulnerable and caring. His Irishness (like many of the rest of the cast) is dialled up to eleven. It’s an engaging performance, even if this old-cove-with-a-heart-of-gold schtick already felt familiar. But blimey, like the rest of the film, it can be far too much.

John Ford would have loved the Irish sentimentality of this film. It’s not perhaps Going My Way’s fault that its unquestioning regard and confidence in the church – and the assumption that all would treat them with complete deference and absolute respect – has dated it. But then maybe this was the case then as well, and it just felt much more reassuring to watch a simple world where a priest has all the answers and can change everyone’s lives. In the simple world of the film, you just let the cliché and coincidence wash over you and go with the flow.

Nevertheless, it still can make for a long watch if you aren’t in the right mood for this constant spin of Sunday-afternoon-gentleness. I have to confess it was too sweet for me – way too sweet. And there isn’t much of interest in the film, McCarey directing with a professional but uninteresting staidness (you couldn’t believe he cut his teeth doing Laurel and Hardy, so visually dull and slow is this film). Every outcome is dipped in sentimentality and sweetness and eventually watching the film is like gorging on candy-floss. Light, insubstantial, not as filling as it should be, and at the end you feel like throwing up.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Brian Donley on the run in Fritz Lang’s Nazi occupation thriller

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (Reinhard Heydrich), Brian Donlevy (Dr Franticek Svoboda), Walter Brennan (Professor Stephen Novotny), Anna Lee (Mascha Novotny), Gene Lockhart (Emil Czaka), Dennis O’Keefe (Jan Horak), Nana Bryant (Hellie Novotny), Margaret Wycherly (Ludmilla Novotny), Tonio Selwart (Chief of Gestapo Kurt Haas), Alexander Granach (Inspector Alois Gruber), Reinhold Schünzel (Inspector Ritter), Jonathan Hale (Dedic)

Film dramas “ripped from the headlines” have a mixed track record. Making a drama about an event that happened so recently the dust has hardly settled leaves you open to making decisions in your film that could later be exposed as mistakes. Few films in history are more headline-ripping though than Hangmen Must Die!, a film about the assassination of Heydrich, the planning of which must have started almost immediately after the news broke.

Dr Svoboda (Brian Donlevy) is on the run in Prague after shooting dead Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s deputy in occupied Czechoslovakia. After a chance meeting, he pleads with Mascha Novotny (Anna Lee) for shelter – but this only serves to endanger her family, particularly her father Professor Novotny (Walter Brennan), in the affair. Meanwhile the Gestapo, led by Alois Gruber (Alexander Granach) investigates and the Nazis take hundreds of Czech notables, including Novotny, into custody as hostages. The Germans promise to execute hostages until the assassin is handed over.

First things first: unlike 2016’s Anthropoid, this film is a complete work of fiction. It is first and foremost a film made by European exiles in the middle of World War II to sing the praises of those defying the march of fascism. Heydrich only appears at the start of the film, played with a sinister, mincing campness by von Twardowski (a notable German socialist exile). Despite this, the arrogance and cruelty of Heydrich is hammered home, with his lines delivered in a bullying, untranslated German. The film uses a dark humour to stress his villainy, Heydrich nonchalantly strolls down a crowded meeting room, forcing those in attendance to remain saluting, swivelling to follow Heydrich, until he finally settles and returns the salute allowing them to relax. It’s a neat little joke and perhaps one of the clear signs of the hand of co-writer Bertolt Brecht. Take a look at the sequence (and rest of the movie as well!) here:

That’s one of the film’s other claims to fame: noted director Fritz Lang worked with fellow exile Brecht to craft the script. As such, the film is a slightly unusual mix between the left-wing, idealist politics of Brecht and the film noir style of Lang. The primary aim is to serve as a propaganda tool, and the courage and bravery of the Czech people is repeatedly stressed. With a few key exceptions, the Czechs are loyal, honest and willing to make huge sacrifices. Lang films this with a stirring simplicity, low angle shots, skilful use of light, and dynamically involving crowd scenes, bringing this courage visually to life. Brechtian touches, such as a crowd of Prague locals confronting Mascha (with increasing menace) when she considers betraying the assassin to save her father’s life, are perfectly complemented by Lang’s skilful film making. The film’s final tribute to the heroes of Europe, with the people of Prague joining together to sing a hymn to the fallen hostages, surges with a left-wing Brechtian political outrage.

What’s most unusual about the film – and one of its problems – is the curious mixture of tones. Perhaps because of its film noir styles, perhaps because of the American accents of many of the Czech characters (interestingly, the exiles overwhelmingly play villainous Germans), this film becomes a sort of behind-the-lines 1930s hard boiled gangster thriller – with the difference that the cops are the baddies. The Gestapo go about their jobs like gangster gumshoes from Hollywood movies. The Czech people, for all their gumption, look and act like streetwise New Yorkers. It’s an odd tone that takes some getting used to.

On top of that, the film shows several hostages (including characters we get to know) shot due to the refusal to hand over the assassin. I can’t watch this without thinking about how little it gets near the true horror of Nazism. The Gestapo here are relative pussycats, compared to the brutal lengths they went to in real life: the Gestapo chief even prudishly talks about a need for evidence. Compared to the thousands of civilians killed in real life, this is nothing. The Germans even essentially “give up” in a coda and accept a defeat. This makes terrific propaganda of course, but it just ties into the sense that this film doesn’t even begin to touch the villainy of the occupation. It makes for better entertainment, but it’s strange to watch today.

Finally, the last problem with the film is the rather mixed performers. Put simply, Brian Donlevy is totally miscast as the assassin, a B-movie actor who is far too American for the part, and incapable of giving the role the depth it needs. Svobada just isn’t interesting or sympathetic. Anna Lee is similarly bland, while the less said about O’Keefe as her fiancée, the better. Not one of the American actors is completely convincing in their role, although Walter Brennan is close to an exception, effectively gentle and wise as the brave Novotny. The best performances are from the exiles, with Graucher in particular excellent as a shrewd, soulless, corrupt detective, with no guilt about the means he uses.

The film culminates in a rather hard-to-follow and far-fetched attempt by the resistance to frame a collaborator (played with weaselly self-importance by Gene Lockhart) for the crime. This plot tends to meander, but there are several very good scenes showing the Czech resistance, including a wonderful sequence in a restaurant that goes from a sit-down, to an unveiling, to a shootout. Lang skilfully builds the tension throughout, and the creeping relentlessness of hostage executions and Svoboda’s attempts to run from the Gestapo are very well done. Sequences such as Svobda ducking into a movie cinema, only to find a keen collaborator inside, sizzle with excitement.

In fact there are many excellent moments in the film. It is beautifully filmed, with a gorgeous use of expressionist shadow and camera angles to create a claustrophobic, doom laden world. Lang’s strength of plotting by-and-large works very well. Though it can’t bring across the full horror of Nazi occupation, the dread of the Gestapo is clear in the movie. “Enhanced interrogation” is underplayed, but it is sinisterly embodied in the fate that befalls an arthritic shopkeeper. We see him exhausted, but not broken, in a prison cell, forced to constantly pick up a chair under interrogation with her weakened hands. Later, a character throws himself out of a window rather than risk being interrogated to reveal information about the resistance. The hostages are brutally dispatched, with the level of panic, fear, collaboration or defiance having no impact on their fates.

It’s a fractured film, overlong but very well filmed, which creates a brilliant tribute to the strength of the Czech people. Trim 20 minutes off it and I think this could have been a great thriller. It’s a strange mix of acting styles, but the marriage of Brecht and Lang works very well (it’s a real shame Brecht never made another film) and the drama of the film carries it over the strange bumps in the road. Brecht, by the way, spent the rest of his life rubbishing Lang, as he couldn’t understand why Lang put all the plot and character into a movie Brecht saw as being purely political.

It’s in many ways a strange historical monument – perhaps its makers couldn’t imagine the depths of Nazi atrocities, perhaps Hollywood wasn’t willing to bring such horrors to the screen. It’s not perfect, but in its own way, it’s a piece of cinematic history.