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Watch On The Rhine started as a Broadway play by Lillian Hellman who wrote the film and saw it open on Broadway at a time when the Soviet Union was still bound to Nazi Germany by that infamous non-aggression pact signed in August of 1939. So much for the fact that Hellman was merely echoing the Communist party line, the line didn't change until a couple of months later. Lillian was actually months ahead of her time with this work.

The play Watch On The Rhine ran from April 1941 to February 1942 for 378 performances and five players came over from Broadway to repeat their roles Frank Wilson as the butler, Eric Roberts as the youngest son, Lucile Watson as the family matriarch and most importantly villain George Coulouris and Paul Lukas.

Lukas pulled an award hat trick in 1943 winning an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and the New York Film Critics for Best Actor. Probably if the Tony Awards had been in existence then he would have won that as well. The Oscar is even more remarkable when you consider who he was up against, Humphrey Bogart for Casablanca, Gary Cooper in For Whom The Bell Tolls, Mickey Rooney in The Human Comedy, and Walter Pidgeon for Madame Curie. Every one of his competitors was a bigger box office movie name than he was. Lukas's nomination is usually the kind the Academy gives to round out a field.

Jack Warner knew that which is why Mady Christians did not repeat her Broadway part and the role of Lukas's wife was given to Bette Davis. Davis took the part not because this was an especially showy role for her, but because she believed in the picture and just wanted to be associated with it. It's the same reason she did The Man Who Came To Dinner, a much lighter play than this one.

Davis is the daughter of a late American Supreme Court Justice who married a German national back in the Weimar days. After many years of being vagabonds on the continent of Europe, Davis Lukas, and their three children come to America which has not yet entered the European War. They're made welcome by Lucile Watson who is thrilled naturally at finally meeting her grandchildren.

The fly in this ointment are some other house guests, a friend of Davis's from bygone days Geraldine Fitzgerald and her husband who is also from Europe, a Rumanian diplomat and aristocrat George Coulouris. Coulouris is a wastrel and a spendthrift and he smells an opportunity for double dealing when he suspects Lukas's anti-fascist background.

His suspicions are quite correct, it's the reason that the family has been the vagabonds they've become. Lukas fought in Spain on the Republican side and was wounded there. His health has not been the same since. His family loyally supports him in whatever decision he makes. Those decisions affect all the other members of the cast.

Adding quite a bit more to the Broadway play including some lovely fascist creatures was Dashiell Hammett who was Lillian Hellman's significant other. Coulouris playing cards at the German embassy was a Hammett creation with such loathsome types as Henry Daniell, Kurt Katch, Clyde Fillmore, Erwin Kalser and Rudolph Anders.

Coulouris is truly one of the most despicable characters ever brought to screen as the no account Runmanian count. He was a metaphor for his own country who embraced the Nazis with gusto and then equally repudiated them without losing a step after Stalingrad.

Lucile Watson was up for Best Supporting Actress in 1943, but lost to Katina Paxinou in For Whom The Bell Tolls. Dashiell Hammett was nominated for best adapted screenplay and the film itself lost for Best Picture to that other anti-fascist classic, Casablanca.

Though it's an item firmly planted in those specific times, Watch On The Rhine still packs a stern anti-fascist message that bears repeating infinitely.

Probably my all-time favorite movie, a story of selflessness, sacrifice and dedication to a noble cause, but it's not preachy or boring. It just never gets old, despite my having seen it some 15 or more times in the last 25 years. Paul Lukas' performance brings tears to my eyes, and Bette Davis, in one of her very few truly sympathetic roles, is a delight. The kids are, as grandma says, more like "dressed-up midgets" than children, but that only makes them more fun to watch. And the mother's slow awakening to what's happening in the world and under her own roof is believable and startling. If I had a dozen thumbs, they'd all be "up" for this movie.

The early period of American involvement in WW-2 was peppered by films, many of them unwatchable these days, that were explicit propaganda. All of them taken together could not touch this gripping account of a man determined to do his part to fight back in the way that fate has chosen for him. Paul Lukas gives a performance worthy of his Oscar as an underground anti-Fascist tortured by his duty to his movement. He has a job to do, and he is going to do it. Of course it takes such men of courage and integrity to beat back evil, but we should not kid ourselves that the job is without personal consequences, even for those who succeed. I always felt bad for my father, who served on a B-17 in the war and shot at Germans, and without doubt, being a crack shot, hit some of them. That he had taken lives with his own hands was something he always found hard to live with. How much more grave is the responsibility to choose when you have the lives of your wife and children to consider - when you are safe in foreign land, when you could easily find other ways to carry on the struggle, but when you know that your particular skill and experience is needed in a very particular way that is incompatible with your continued well-being? Lukas embodies all this in a way that literally gave me goose bumps. The truth is always so much more effective than jingoism. This film is the truth. It bears comparison with Casablanca - the nonchalant heroism of Viktor Laszlo seems rather self-important next to the tortured will of Kurt Muller.

The Dashiell Hammett script is wonderful and deserved an award of its own. The supporting players all do a fine job. George Coulouris as the unctuous and self-serving Count gives a performance of great and icy villainy. What a superb film!

This was another high-profile Oscar-winner (for Paul Lukas as Best Actor) which had eluded me thus far; the film is a topical, i.e. wartime, Warner Bros. drama which served as both a prestige production and a vehicle for their No. 1 female star – Bette Davis. Still, the actress is content here to play second-fiddle to Lukas – much as had been the case with the classic comedy THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER (1941), co-starring Monty Woolley. Perhaps not coincidentally, both were inspired by plays and, consequently, proved verbose and stylistically limited; indeed, the only other film helmed by Broadway director Schumlin was the loose Graham Greene adaptation CONFIDENTIAL AGENT (1945), as it happened, another espionage thriller.

Anyway, WATCH ON THE RHINE (scripted by popular crime novelist Dashiell Hammett – whose THE MALTESE FALCON had been thrice filmed by the studio in the space of a decade! – from the original by his partner Lillian Hellman) also bore a striking resemblance to another recent Warner Bros. effort, CASABLANCA; previewed in December 1942 but opening for general release the following year, it ended up competing with the film under review in some of the top Oscar categories (including Best Picture, Actor and Adapted Screenplay). It is telling, however, that for a movie that underwent major changes during production, CASABLANCA holds together much more firmly than the stolid WATCH ON THE RHINE and, needless to say, also caught the public fancy to a much greater extent – remaining one of the most fondly-remembered Hollywood classics to this day!

The comparisons between the two films involve the chase by Nazis for an underground leader: here, it is anti-Fascist German Lukas (quite fine under the circumstances, if frail-looking for the requirements of the role and evidently struggling with the rich dialogue – invariably delivered in a Hungarian accent he never managed to shake off, like his compatriot Bela Lugosi!) who has come to Washington to stay with the family of wife Davis (who seems perennially on the verge of tears here!); also living there are a rather wasted Geraldine Fitzgerald and her ill-suited and impoverished Romanian aristocrat partner George Coulouris, sympathetic to the Third Reich (represented by Henry Daniell and Kurt Katch) despite having fallen out of favour with them. Indeed, when he suspects Lukas' true identity, he realizes it is a chance for him to once again enter into the Party's good books! Davis' relatives (outspoken society mother Lucile Watson – the other Oscar nominee here – and debonair brother Donald Woods, who carries a flame for Fitzgerald) at first are confused by the intrigue but, when it comes to choose sides, they obviously pick up the cause of the Resistance. While the confrontation scenes between Lukas and Coulouris easily emerge as the film's trump card, the speechifying does make for heavy-going viewing (with the schtick relating to the Lukases' indoctrinated yet wide-eyed children tilting proceeding dangerously towards outright boredom!).

Many of the criticisms on this thread seem to pick a comparison of this film with "The Mortal Storm" or "Casablanca". Everyone is entitled to compare films they choose, but the similarities of "The Mortal Storm" and "Watch On The Rhine" are clearly the problems of refugees threatened by the Nazi juggernaut, while the main comparative point brought out with "Casablanca" is the seeming unjust treatment of Humphrey Bogart in 1943 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, because they chose Paul Lukas instead for the Best Actor Oscar. It does not strike me as totally wrong. Lukas had a good career in film (both here and in England - he is the villain in "The Lady Vanishes"), and this performance was his best one. Bogart had more great performances in him than Rick Blaine (for instance, he was ignored for Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon" and Roy Earle in "High Sierra" two years earlier, both of which were first rate performances, and he would not get an Oscar for his greatest performances as Fred C. Dobbs in "The Treasure Of Sierra Madres", the writer/murder suspect in "In A Lonely Place", and Captain Philip Francis Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny" afterward - he got it for Charley in "The African Queen"). I think that Bogie should have got it for the role of Dobbs, but it did not happen. But Lukas was lucky - he got it on the defining performance of his lesser career. Few can claim that.

To me the film to look at with "Watch On The Rhine" is based on another play/script by Hellman, "The Searching Wind". They both look at America's spirit of isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s. "The Searching Wind" is really looking at the whole inter-war period, while "Watch On The Rhine", set in the years just proceeding our entry into World War II, deals with a few weeks of time. Therefore it is better constructed as a play, and more meaningful for it's impact.

The film has many good performances, led by Lukas as the exhausted but determined anti-Nazi fighter/courier, Davis as his loyal wife (wisely keeping her character as low keyed as possible due to Lukas being the center of the play's activities), Coulouris as the selfish, conniving, but ultimately foolish and ineffective Teck, Lucille Watson as the mother of Davis and Geraldine Fitzgerald (as Coulouris' wiser and sadder and fed up wife), and Kurt Katch, who delivers a devastating critique (as the local embassy's Gestapo chief) about Coulouris and others who would deal with the Nazis. It has dialog with bite in it. And what it says is quite true. It also has moments of near poetry. Witness the scene, towards the end, when Coulouris is left alone with Lukas and Davis, and says, "The New World has left the scene to the Old World". Hellman could write very well at times.

Given the strength of the film script and performances I would rate this film highly among World War II films.