The Hour Before the Dawn

Surely not the greatest antiwar picture ever made but hardly as bad as its reputation suggests.

Veronica is a Nazi agent pretending to be an exile from her country who has managed to wheedle her way into wealthy Binnie Barnes good graces. As Binnie's personal maid she manages to also ingratiate herself with the prestigious and politically connected family Binnie has married into. Their pacifist son, Franchot Tone, falls for her which she again uses to her advantage when the cell she's involved in call on her to strike.

Not a top notch Maugham adaptation but it tells its wartime story efficiently, if with a minimum of action. Veronica's career took a big hit when this failed at the box office with the critics and studio assigning most of the blame to her. Hard to see why though.

She's not as assured as in her best films but she doesn't embarrass herself. Her accent is variable but you'll have definitely heard worse in other films and the lack of her signature hairstyle can be laid at the feet of the government's request for her to change it. It was during the filming of this picture that she tripped over a cable causing a miscarriage and her absence from the screen for a period of time. With the failure of this film and no immediate one to follow it up and regain ground the studio apparently lost faith in her and started casting her in fluffy junk that quickly lead to her career default. It surely didn't help that she had a reputation for being difficult, stemming from an untreated bi-polar disorder, and was unpopular at Paramount. A shame though since even miscast as she is here she still has a powerful screen presence and holds the viewers eye whenever she's in a scene.

As for the rest of the film, Tone and the always welcome Binnie Barnes make the most of their parts but the direction lacks focus which even with the short running time allows the film to become slack at times.