A more unrealistic movie about Nazi Germany could not be imagined. Set in 1939, after six years of Hitler, when Austria and the Sudetenland had been invaded, it posits that the German people had no idea that Hitler wanted war. Apart from one brief reference to "a Jewish tailor" who had some sort of trouble and a quick flash on one anti-semitic sign, one would never guess that German Jews had been treated in any way out of the ordinary. The naivete is personified in the beautiful, swan-like Diana Wynyard, who becomes director of Nazi pageants--she looks out at Nuremberg stadium filled with swastika flags and says, "I must say, it looks rather good."
Diana thinks her husband, Clive Brook, is a traitor for starting a short-wave station on which he broadcasts such shocking charges as that the Nazis tell lies and preach hatred. He is finally trapped by Raymond Huntley, not the most terrifying Nazi since in British films he is always the prissy civil servant or the ineffectual bank manager.
The point of this movie is as bewildering as it is bizarre. The British, in the middle of a war, are being told not to blame the Germans because they didn't know Hitler was a bad egg? If some German sympathisers were behind this film, they couldn't have done very much damage, since it is very, very dull. There can't have been too many viewers who stayed through the whole thing to be propagandized.
Diana thinks her husband, Clive Brook, is a traitor for starting a short-wave station on which he broadcasts such shocking charges as that the Nazis tell lies and preach hatred. He is finally trapped by Raymond Huntley, not the most terrifying Nazi since in British films he is always the prissy civil servant or the ineffectual bank manager.
The point of this movie is as bewildering as it is bizarre. The British, in the middle of a war, are being told not to blame the Germans because they didn't know Hitler was a bad egg? If some German sympathisers were behind this film, they couldn't have done very much damage, since it is very, very dull. There can't have been too many viewers who stayed through the whole thing to be propagandized.