It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

I had never heard of this film, despite very much liking Tyrone Power and sometimes liking Joan Fontaine. But it's a gem...mostly! Tyrone Power...well, I may be a man, but what a hunk! And, more importantly, what an actor, and he's as good here as ever as a former soldier troubled as WWII gets more and more difficult. Joan Fontaine here has lost her sometimes-haughtiness, and is so good as the upper class young lady who joins the WAF and falls in love (with Power).Thomas Mitchell, usually a favorite character actor of mine, seemed slightly out of place here as an older soldier. Nigel Bruce has a very nice role here as an innkeeper; if you don't know he's in the film, you almost might not recognize him. Gladys Cooper, a wonderful character actress is here; sometimes she was wonderfully sweet, and sometimes quite the opposite; this is quite the opposite, and she doesn't get much screen time. One of the better small roles is Alexander Knox as a minister who knows the horror of war.The story is a good one -- a deserter (although we don't know that until later in the film) is struggling because of his reasons for not going back to the front...not cowardice, but animosity toward who the war will really benefit (the upper class of British society). He falls in love with an upper class British girl who has joined the WAF. They have some wonderful times together, but then he becomes hunted. Where will he go? What will he ultimately do? And then he is severely injured when saving a family during an air raid, and Fontaine's father -- a surgeon -- saves his life...and Fontaine and Power are married in the hospital.I wasn't particularly enamored with the ending, which seemed to come very suddenly, but overall this was a very well-done film. Some say it's 20th Century Fox's answer to MGM's "Mrs. Miniver" (also 1942). The latter is a fine film starring one of my favorite actresses, but I think I prefer "This Above All". Highly recommended, though because of the ending it will not end up on my DVD shelf.

Although the English born, Laurence Olivier, Richard Greene, or Robert Donat would have done the part of Clive Briggs great justice, there was nothing wrong with the performance Tyrone Power gave in This Above All. Power does not even attempt an English accent, yet his performance is every bit as good as Robert Taylor's in Waterloo Bridge. Eric Knight's novel was a big seller and the film is a serious examination as to why this is the people's war. In a curious way Power's views which do undergo a radical transformation are a mirror image of what Marlon Brando said in The Young Lions about class distinctions.And in the same year of This Above All, Teresa Wright in Mrs. Miniver upheld the tradition of the upper classes. One of my favorite scenes from that film is Wright telling Richard Ney about the things she's involved in to make her corner of the world better. Joan Fontaine feels the same way, before she meets the cynical Power she tells her family that she feels she has to get in and do her bit. She joins the Women's Auxiliary Army Force as an enlistee, not even an officer. She feels as did Wright that class also carries responsibility.Power and Fontaine are a perfectly matched pair, she just coming off her Oscar and him at the height of his box office draw. Hollywood's English colony fills out the rest of the cast with the exception of Thomas Mitchell who is inevitably Irish.This Above All won an Oscar for Best Art Direction and it was nominated in several other categories. The film holds up remarkably well because it is both patriotic, but a very atypical and cynical film for its time, not your normal flag-waver.

I find that the movie channels are playing the same"classics" over and over again. Can it be that we are running out of old films? I find that hard to believe? I see now that TCM is starting to present films from 1970 as "classics" AMC started doing that about 10 years ago, and frankly I stopped watching the channel.Surely there are so many we can view between 1927 and 1960 that have never been seen on TV. Which brings me to my comments on "This Above All" Very simply put, I saw this beautiful film when I was oh, maybe 15 years old and already a film buff. It was on the 4:30 movie on Channel 4(NYC) in the late 60's/ early 70's . I was very touched by the film even then..I am hoping TCM plays it. It would be a long time coming...

This film stars Joan Fontaine and Tyrone Power as a couple who meet and fall in love during the darkest days of WWII--even though Fontaine actually knows very little about Power and his checkered past.From the onset, I was a bit surprised by the decision to cast Tyrone Power. Sure, he was a big, handsome star with 20th Century-Fox, but he was playing a Brit--even though he had no trace of a British accent. Now had they said he was a Canadian, it might have been much more believable. As for Ms. Fontaine, I am often critical of her performances (since I think she got the Oscar for a lackluster performance), but here she is exceptional and very effective.The other major problem I have with the film is the whole notion of the romance. First, Fontaine is a true patriot--a member of the nobility that could have sat on her butt through the war but volunteered for the military. Yet, she manages to fall in love with a man who, as far as she knows, hasn't volunteered or served. And, when it turns out he's a deserter, she STILL agrees to marry him!!! Now, you do discover that he's really not such a coward and he does manage to redeem himself, but still you wonder how Fontaine could come to love this man based on who he was at that time.It's a shame really because apart from these problems, it's a very lovely film--with exceptional direction, music, acting and a wonderful evocative mood. In fact, as a positive propaganda piece, it's exceptional and was very timely in 1942--though just a tad preachy. Overall, it's still a good film and worth your time--just don't try to get too hung up on the plot holes or it will ruin your viewing.PS--In the film, Fontaine says "I am not a blue stocking". I looked up this term and it's an outdated slur that refers to a educated rich woman who was a member of a particular British literary society. The members were known for being total "fuddy-duddies".