Fast and sometimes exciting tale of a newspaper during the London blitz, amid Nazi conspiracies to undermine morale.
Richard Greene is the correspondent who makes his way back to his Fleet Street newspaper from Dunkirk and Valerie Hobson is the novice lady reporter who is reassigned from the food column to stories of more substance.
One of the subjects is the People for Peace, a small but busy group of men claiming that Hitler actually has the morality of a Buddhist monk or something. One of their henchmen is an almost unrecognizably young Andre Morell, putting on a curious accent. Their motto is "Peace in Our Time." Poor Neville Chamberlain. He could have prevented World War II simply by declaring war on Germany at the Munich meetings.
The two intrepid reporters, dashing about the strepitous city, barely escaping the collapse of burning walls, expose the pernicious cabal and fall in love in front of a backdrop of the city in ruins except for the dome of St. Paul's.
At the climax, the endearing Scotsman who edits the paper reads tomorrow's lead, which goes something like, "Goering has said he will bomb London flat because it is the heart. Very well. The heart will continue to beat." The reason the line is memorable is not so much for its defiant quality but because, a few years later, the Allies were demolishing one German city after another and the ruins were papered over with signs proclaiming, "Unsere Mauern brechen, unsere Herzen nicht," precisely the same sentiment and a similar analogy. And in fact the post-war Strategic Bombing Survey found that bombs were very good at tearing up cities but poor at breaking citizens' morale.
But let's get back to Valerie Hobson. She's tall, slender, beautiful, and oozes elegance. She looks rather like Cate Blanchett except that she lacks Blanchett's extraordinary eyes. Richard Greene is adequate as the heroic reporter who helps save Hobson's bacon from the likes of that villainous, scowling Andre Morell.
It's not a big budget movie but the production values are high enough so that we're not distracted by substandard sets. And there's hardly a dull moment -- or a brutal one. No scenes of battle and only a bit of gunfire towards the end. And a nice, familiar cast, with Basil Radford and Miles Malleson in support. Sometimes it seemed that the British film industry had only half a dozen principal performers during the war, and no more than double that number into the 50s.
Other movies have been made about the blitz but they're either sentimental stories of worried families, like "Mrs. Miniver" or semi-autobiographical and more realistic accounts like John Boorman's "Hope and Glory." This one avoids sentimentality almost completely in favor of a sort of "training film" approach, only instead of "Assembly And Use Of The Sten Gun," it's "Optimal Responses to Bombing." That last scene, with the two lovers posed against a dim sun rising over a ruined urban landscape is touching and informative. It's a useful reminder of just how destructive war can be. America hasn't fought a war on its own ground for 150 years.
A reminder might stimulate our thoughts a bit more, at least among those of us who seem so anxious to kill them all and let God sort them out. The only people who seem more warlike than those who have never known war are those who have never known anything else. I blame hormones. We have to get rid of all that testosterone. Imagine if all the men in the world were turned overnight into fairies. All they would do is try to insult each other to death.
Richard Greene is the correspondent who makes his way back to his Fleet Street newspaper from Dunkirk and Valerie Hobson is the novice lady reporter who is reassigned from the food column to stories of more substance.
One of the subjects is the People for Peace, a small but busy group of men claiming that Hitler actually has the morality of a Buddhist monk or something. One of their henchmen is an almost unrecognizably young Andre Morell, putting on a curious accent. Their motto is "Peace in Our Time." Poor Neville Chamberlain. He could have prevented World War II simply by declaring war on Germany at the Munich meetings.
The two intrepid reporters, dashing about the strepitous city, barely escaping the collapse of burning walls, expose the pernicious cabal and fall in love in front of a backdrop of the city in ruins except for the dome of St. Paul's.
At the climax, the endearing Scotsman who edits the paper reads tomorrow's lead, which goes something like, "Goering has said he will bomb London flat because it is the heart. Very well. The heart will continue to beat." The reason the line is memorable is not so much for its defiant quality but because, a few years later, the Allies were demolishing one German city after another and the ruins were papered over with signs proclaiming, "Unsere Mauern brechen, unsere Herzen nicht," precisely the same sentiment and a similar analogy. And in fact the post-war Strategic Bombing Survey found that bombs were very good at tearing up cities but poor at breaking citizens' morale.
But let's get back to Valerie Hobson. She's tall, slender, beautiful, and oozes elegance. She looks rather like Cate Blanchett except that she lacks Blanchett's extraordinary eyes. Richard Greene is adequate as the heroic reporter who helps save Hobson's bacon from the likes of that villainous, scowling Andre Morell.
It's not a big budget movie but the production values are high enough so that we're not distracted by substandard sets. And there's hardly a dull moment -- or a brutal one. No scenes of battle and only a bit of gunfire towards the end. And a nice, familiar cast, with Basil Radford and Miles Malleson in support. Sometimes it seemed that the British film industry had only half a dozen principal performers during the war, and no more than double that number into the 50s.
Other movies have been made about the blitz but they're either sentimental stories of worried families, like "Mrs. Miniver" or semi-autobiographical and more realistic accounts like John Boorman's "Hope and Glory." This one avoids sentimentality almost completely in favor of a sort of "training film" approach, only instead of "Assembly And Use Of The Sten Gun," it's "Optimal Responses to Bombing." That last scene, with the two lovers posed against a dim sun rising over a ruined urban landscape is touching and informative. It's a useful reminder of just how destructive war can be. America hasn't fought a war on its own ground for 150 years.
A reminder might stimulate our thoughts a bit more, at least among those of us who seem so anxious to kill them all and let God sort them out. The only people who seem more warlike than those who have never known war are those who have never known anything else. I blame hormones. We have to get rid of all that testosterone. Imagine if all the men in the world were turned overnight into fairies. All they would do is try to insult each other to death.