Bon Voyage

Shot in 1944 entirely in French (version seen has English subtitles), in style rather like a short section of a budget version of his "Lady Vanishes", it must have been intended for clandestine distribution in occupied and Vichy France. For this reason and the fact that it appears to have a clear practical purpose it presumably is a training film. It is thus not primarily a tribute to the French Resistance, its purpose seems instead to be to warn them of a dangerous new Gestapo method of infiltration. Hitchcock's contribution was to make the message clear and hold the attention.

It concerns the return to England of a British air-gunner (played by English actor John Blythe in French) recently escaped from a German prisoner of war camp. He has safely arrived back in London due to the help he received from the French Resistance and is being de-briefed by French exile officers. What should though have been a happy conclusion to a successful escape is soured when the true tragic facts are revealed to him that he has been an innocent pawn in a dastardly Gestapo design for the infiltration of the French resistance network. In this he was made a carrier of something deadly - not disease but something similarly poisonous - that he had been made to unwittingly expose members of the Resistance. One guesses that the main purpose of the film was to warn everyone of this.

Disclaimer: This review is based on versions of Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache as seen on Turner Classic Movies. These versions were copyrighted 1993, and I'm assuming they are the same versions previously available on VHS and more recently on DVD. The following criticism is aimed at saving people much grief and money. If someone has seen the DVD and can disqualify any of my remarks, I welcome you to do so. There are so few accurate reviews of obscure DVDs.

Alfred Hitchcock made Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (Madagascar Adventure) in 1944 to help the war effort by encouraging the French Resistance. The only people who have ever heard of these short films are Hitchcock fanatics, but even the most die-hard fans need not waste any time looking for these rarities. There is little in Bon Voyage and nothing in Aventure Malgache to indicate the hand of Hitchcock. Both films are in French and suffer from boring framing stories hung with flashbacks and constant voice-over narration. It is unlike Hitch to use so much dialog and the subtitles are difficult to read. The white lettering is hard to read against lighter parts of the background and at least half of the subtitles in Bon Voyage are cropped off the bottom of the screen.

Aventure Malgache tells of the French Resistance smuggling people out of Nazi-controlled Madagascar and is a completely forgettable film. Bon Voyage is more interesting. It tells of a British flier who has escaped from a POW camp. He is traveling with another escaped POW and helped by the Resistance, but there are double-crosses and murder in their path. However, only the murder scenes look like Hitchcock while the other scenes are very static. There is minimal camera movement and when the actors aren't sitting around talking they are shuffling around like zombies. The cropped subtitles leave viewers guessing at many of the finer details. Many references to passwords, place-names, and other important details (something about a cigarette used as a signal) are completely illegible. Bon Voyage does include the "old Gestapo trick" that Martin Landau mentions near the end of North By Northwest, but this is the only connection I could see to Hitch's other films.

If the DVD is significantly better than what I have described (new subtitles in yellow, for instance), please write a review saying so. It is very hard to find detailed reviews of obscure foreign films on DVD. Now I'm going to go critique the 1990 version of Cyrano.

"Bon Voyage" is a very short propaganda film about the French resistance which Hitchcock did for the war effort in 1944. It was met with disappointment and later shelved.

The only person billed is John Blythe; the rest are called "The Moliere Players" to protect them from the Nazis.

Blythe plays a Scottish RAF Sgt. John Dougall. He is being debriefed about his escape from France by French intelligence officers in London.

Dougall has escaped from a prisoner of war camp along with Stefan Godowski, who actually put the plan together. The two stick together until there is a Resistance-aided pick-up in France by plane. But only one can go, so they shoot dice for it. Dougall is the one to leave.

Upon meeting with the Intelligence agents, Dougall says that he hopes Godowski made it and wants to know what happened. As it turns out, although the agents wanted Dougall's story about how he was helped along the way, they already knew it.

Good story, but it was too low-key for what the government wanted from Hitchcock - a real rah-rah story and big ending concerning the Resistance.Instead, it showed ordinary people taking risks, which I found moving and effective.

An old woman I knew was in Vienna studying just before the war broke out and, for academic reasons, went looking for Heinrich Mann, who was hiding out in France. (And I just saw a film about this very thing, Varian's War). On the beach, she saw a man and woman playing ball on the beach, and the ball kept landing near her. They turned out to be members of the Resistance.

I believe she did find Mann in a bar somewhere, but what impressed her (and me) is that this couple told her that they would never quit their work until Nazism was defeated.

In the end, I think Hitchcock told the right story. It's not the big triumph but the work that people do leading up to it, sometimes small things, that win a war.

Coming from someone who considers Alfred Hitchcock her all-time favourite director, both Aventure Malgache and Bon Voyage are interesting curiosities but neither see Hitchcock at his best. While I didn't think much of Aventure Malgache, Bon Voyage was very well-done and you can see why Hitchcock himself was fond of it. The script is lacking in tautness and has a tendency to plod and a couple of the flashbacks flow a little too stiffly, even with those there is much to recommend. While Bon Voyage doesn't quite have Hitchcock all over it or see him show what he was most good at, there is more evidence of his directing style than in Aventure Malgache, the suspense levels are not exactly strong but Bon Voyage is not dull either and has some fun to it. The camera work is clever and meticulously composed and the crisp black and white also impresses. The score is a good mix of haunting and playful, while the story is simpler, much less confused and has some nice twists and turns. Unlike Aventure Malgache, Bon Voyage thankfully is not too dialogue heavy, the French are portrayed more sensitively and the propaganda elements, while also on the dated side, more subtly handled. John Blythe is decent in the lead role. To conclude, not a classic but it is not bad at all and of Hitchcock two French shorts he made in the 40s this is the far superior of the two. 7/10 Bethany Cox

"Bon Voyage" was one of two short French language propaganda films made by Alfred Hitchcock for the British Ministry of Information in 1944, the other being "Aventure Malgache". The film depicts the escape of a downed Royal Air Force air gunner through German-occupied France, with the assistance of Resistance fighters. The purpose was presumably to inform French exiles in Britain and America, and those living in territory controlled by the Free French Government, of the work being done, and the sacrifices being made, by their compatriots in the Resistance.

The film is very short, at only 26 minutes long, and today is likely to be principally of interest to Hitchcock completists. It does, however, have its points of interest, notably its use of multiple viewpoints of the same events, a technique that looks forward to later films such as Kurosawa's "Rashomon". We see the airman being debriefed by a Free French intelligence officer in London and quickly realise that the intelligence officer knows things about the escape that the young man himself is unaware of, especially that he has been an unwitting pawn in a German scheme for getting information to one of their agents in Britain. Another theme of the film is a warning to the French to be on their guard against the dirty tricks of the Germans and their Vichy French collaborators.

"Bon Voyage" was presumably intended principally as a propaganda film rather than as dramatic entertainment; had it been intended as the latter, it would have needed to have been at least three times as long. This is the reason why I have not awarded it a mark out of ten.