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"Oh, you belong to the underground?" "Body and soul." The bombing raid misses the classroom to the schoolboy's disappointment, cf. Boorman's Hope and Glory, it does supply the "slight interruption" needed for the convict (Errol Flynn) to flee the guillotine. So roguish he can't resist seducing the girlfriend (Faye Emerson) of a fellow scoundrel (Sheldon Leonard) mid-getaway, he's captured in Bordeaux by an inspector with a hidden judo throw (Paul Lukas). During the trip back to Paris, he offers to give himself up as a Resistance saboteur to save the lives of hostages rounded up by the Gestapo. A doomed man discovering courage, or a knave working out an escape plan? "Here I help you dig my own grave, and you still don't trust me." The Occupation by way of Raoul Walsh's kinetic metaphysics, a superb rumination on rascality and commitment and sacrifice. A three-day deadline, too much time or not enough for romance with the local belle (Jean Sullivan). Pretense is the scalawag's coin, his jailer recommends a cleansing in church and grudgingly plays confessor, the prisoner picks a cushioned pew and spins tall tales. The dawning of heroism is never far from the awareness of death, "I'm tasting every breath, I'm counting every step." For her part, the shopkeeper (Lucile Watson) is willing to turn the quiet village into a lynching mob to save her son from the firing squad, as tough as the gangland matriarch in White Heat. A sturdy old mare carries the national spirit, a career criminal rises to the occasion before a disbelieving Nazi. "The French capacity for magnificent gestures has always bored me to extinction." The impersonation that frees the condemned, the true prayer delivered through a counterfeit admission, "the right ending" understood by Rossellini in General Della Rovere. With James Flavin, Douglass Dumbrille, Dennis Hoey, Francis Pierlot, Odette Myrtil, Art Smith, and Ivan Triesault. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |