Some things I liked some I did not.

Purely Joyful Movie!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Script continuity: Katherine Strueby. Made with the co-operation of General De Gaulle. Associate producer: John Stafford. Producer: George King. Executive producer: S.W. Smith. A British Aviation Production. (Available on a very good, full-length Odeon DVD).Copyright 20 March 1943 in the USA by Republic Pictures Corp. New York opening at the Abbey: 7 May 1943. U.K. release through British Lion: 5 April 1943. London trade show: December 1942. Australian release through G.B.D./20th Century-Fox: 31 March 1944. 7,882 feet. 87½ minutes. Cut to 78 minutes in the U.S.A.U.S. release title: AT DAWN WE DIE.SYNOPSIS: The daughter of a French mayor poses as a collaborator to allow a spy to escape to England with vital U-boat information.COMMENT: Although allegedly based on a true story, the plot follows a well-grooved path. Greta Gynt makes a surprisingly charming and attractive heroine. But John Clements is most unbelievable, while Godfrey Tearle seems unaccountably to be doing a masquerade part with a dubbed voice! Some of the other players are better, particularly and surprisingly Stepanek, who makes up for his late entrance with a full-blooded if conventional portrait of a sarcastic, sadistic villain. Sinclair is as unconvincing as usual, but Wendhausen is ideally cast and one is sorry when he is killed.However, too much of Yvonne Arnaud's French-type mother-figure doesn't help. The film would certainly benefit by some astute cutting, though the action scenes are fine. Direction, while mostly routine, does have occasional flashes of style. Photography is first-class, and so is art direction. Production values, despite the obvious use of models in some sequences, are quite fair.

Director George King, who regularly delivered the goods in his rousing Victorian Tod Slaughter vehicles of the thirties seriously comes a cropper attempting here to address grim contemporary events in Occupied Europe on a shoestring. Cardboard characters strike poses and mouth banalities against a backdrop of cardboard studio exteriors, failing utterly to rise to the challenge presented by the enormities depicted abroad, doubtless inspired by the recent destruction by the Germans of the Czech town of Lidice. King did a considerably better job with similar subject matter on his next film 'Candlelight in Algeria' (1944).

One's first thoughts are how clichéd this film is. But then you realise, as with Shakespeare, that the characters and situations only became clichés because of the constant copying of the theme in subsequent movies. Whereas things appear to fall into the hero's lap as per usual, the action is, at times, surprisingly realistic. A female collaborator is viciously slapped about by the SS and later gunned down by the Resistance. In turn two German officers are shot in the back without compassion and in retaliation fifty hostages are rounded up and shot. Thankfully off-screen. However in the midst of all of this is a hilarious scene in a cinema when the French clientele,at being subjected to a newsreel of Hitler, begin catcalling and making shadows on the screen. These include a V-sign, a fist punching Hitler in the face, and fingers tugging at the Furher's hair. All in all an enjoyable propaganda film

Somewhat out of the blue this wartime resistance drama has recently surfaced on Movies4Men.It is one of numerous similar films made around the same time of the war eg Flemish Farm,Freedom Radio which purported to show to English audiences what it was like to live in Occupied Europe.One wonders at this remove what their purpose was.Were they just rousing adventure stories or were they meant to show to the English audiences just how beastly the Nazis were and how the occupied nations were resisting them.I suppose the one standout of this film is the performance of Yvonne Arnaud.She is truly head and shoulders above the rest of the cast.This film is reasonably entertaining and worth a viewing