Though many Irishmen voluntarily joined the British forces in World War II, the country's official neutrality must have aroused a great deal of resentment and anger among the British fighting for their lives at home and abroad. This movie could be seen as an attempt at reconciliation, not by trying to justify the Irish policy as a response to centuries of British oppression but by characterizing Irish super-patriots as eccentric and silly. Nothing succeeds with the English like making them feel superior.
Deborah Kerr was seldom so tender, vulnerable, and utterly lovely as in her role as a girl brought up on her family's semi-mythical stories of rebellion and guerrilla fighting who, with World War II under way for several years, decides to join the IRA. But before she manages to do that, she encounters a German spy who apparently takes about five minutes to convince her that her that she would do just as well serving her enemy's enemy. Since she declares that, although living in a remote rural area, she reads newspapers and is up to date, one cannot consider her a backward eccentric. So--if we think about it--we have to assume that she is indifferent to Nazi terror, murder, and genocide. In other words, she is a monster. Kerr plays her as a romantic, over-enthusiastic young girl who sees herself as a character in a girls' adventure book, but it's not enough to give her a pass. She is, after all, supposed to be 21, not six. Even at sixteen she would be expected to have more morals and sense.
