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Lidice 1942, oppression, resistance, retaliation. Patience is the virtue preached during the German occupation, the Czech underground is fired up by the Prodigal Son (Alan Curtis) back from England, a pure matter of "pressure and counter-pressure." Education is verboten, Reichsprotektor Heydrich (John Carradine) usurps the professor's seat at a classroom when not leering at a lineup of local maidens. (The villain drives through the celebration of wheat and provokes a priest into getting shot, a scene that starts like A Tale of Two Cities and ends like Roma, Città Aperta.) The village elder (Ralph Morgan) and his daughter (Patricia Morison), miners and pharmacists, even the poaching hermit (Edgar Kennedy), "strictly an apolitical character," all take up the cause to the very end. "Dead men can't avenge themselves." Douglas Sirk in Hollywood, leading an eloquent émigré nexus (Eugen Schüfftan is the uncredited cinematographer, Edgar G. Ulmer the designer). Lang in the same year mines the visceral dread of the situation (Hangmen Also Die!), here are its sardonic cruelties. A villager waits at dinner for her captured husband to be returned as promised, she faints before the coffin brought in, her young son helps himself to the bread loaf at the table. Heydrich agonizing in his deathbed is done with Nazi nonsense, he dies "like a hero" or so says Himmler (Howard Freeman), the mayor (Ludwig Stössel) is denied a dignified exit despite his desperate Sieg Heils. The luckless fugitive couple (cp. Borzage's The Mortal Storm), St. Sebastian the silent witness. The massacre is memorialized by Sirk and Millay in an Our Town coup, as phantoms recite her poem over the flames for the audience "thinking we are immune." With Al Shean, Elizabeth Russell, and Jimmy Conlin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |