Unpublished Story

The lasting value of this film is the almost documentary scenes from the blitz in the shelters with a lot of insights into ordinary people and, above all, a newspaper being bombed and getting on with the work anyway. This is 1942 in the worst heat of the war but after the blitz, the film starts with the Dunkirk trauma with Richard Greene getting away from France with one of the last boats and then continuing his reporting business under the blitz of London, where he runs into lovely Valerie Hobson and a spy circle, masked as a movement for "Peace in Our Time", one of the most ironic headlines in history. But in the heart of the intrigue is a small man Trapes (Frederick Cooper in a very memorable performance), who actually believes in peace and preaches it with all the good faith of Neville Chamberlain, and his case is the most interesting human part of the film. He is bombed out, like so many others, and his whole world is shattered, which makes him wake up to a new reality, and he takes the consequences, even if they turn to be fatal. Richard Greene becomes secondary in all this, while it's London under the blitz which is the main actor of this almost documentary of the darkest hour of Britain in London.