Passport to Destiny

Googily little wartime fantasy about a cleaning lady who, convinced a lucky charm owned by her late husband (played in two photographs by an uncredited Charles Laughton, Lanchester's real-life husband) will keep her from harm, goes to Berlin to "give that blooming Mr. Hitler what for." Ably supported by a cast of first-rate comics, particularly Lumsdale Hare and Fritz Feld, it still requires Miss Lanchester at her most wide-eyed to pull this one off.

While I have seen a lot of wartime propaganda pictures, I must admit that "Passport to Destiny" is among the strangest of them! The story is about a very weird lady (Elsa Lanchester) who thinks her good luck charm will keep her from all harm. And, because of this, she is going to sneak into Germany and murder Hitler!!

The lady rather easily arrives in Germany and pretends to be deaf and unable to talk. Oddly, the Nazis hire her as a janitor to work in the very building where the top Nazis work...and her plan appears to be going quite well. So what's next? See the film.

The film never really makes much sense and if you are looking for realism, you had best skip this one. Lanchester's character rather easily gets into wartime Germany and gets out even easier! And, she very easily gets a job with access to top Nazis....something else that makes little sense. So, provided you can turn off your brain and just enjoy, the film is worth seeing--otherwise, it's a dopey little film, that's for sure!

During World War II, London widow Elsa Lanchester (as Ella Muggins) reminisces about her deceased husband Albert. A notorious liar, he claimed to have "magic eye" which protected him from harm. Sadly, Albert wasn't carrying the glassy object when he expired. Locating the magic eye in an attic, Ms. Lanchester carries it safely through a German air raid. Convinced she now possesses a charmed life, Lanchester wisely decides to assassinate Adolf Hitler. She stows away on a ship and makes her way to Germany...

In Berlin, Lanchester looks up Hitler in the local phone book. She poses as a deaf mute cleaning woman attending to Nazi officials. These scenes are amusing. In a subplot, resistance officer Gordon Oliver (as Franz von Weber) seeks to rescue his sweetheart Lenore Aubert (as Greta Neuman) from a Gestapo prison. Reliably funny Fritz Feld and effectively villainous Lionel Royce have the best supporting material. The photograph of "Albert" is, as you might suspect, Lanchester's real-life spouse Charles Laughton.

***** Passport to Destiny (1/31/44) Ray McCarey ~ Elsa Lanchester, Gordon Oliver, Fritz Feld, Lionel Royce

This is surely one of the most extraordinary films to have come out of America during the war. It is also notable for being the only Hollywood movie in which Elsa Lanchester, best known as The Bride of Frankenstein, had the lead part and top billing. She plays a cockney charlady who is convinced she's protected by a "lucky charm" once owned by her late husband (cut to a photo of Charles Laughton) and is resolved to assassinate Hitler. During the London blitz, armed only with her bucket and a mop, she stows away on a ship across the English Channel and proceeds to scrub her way across Occupied Europe by pretending to be deaf and dumb. She lands up in Hitler's HQ in Berlin where language problems are solved by all the 'bad' Germans speaking English with funny guttural accents! Elsa gets a job as a cleaner in Hitler's office but he's out at the time so she delivers a propaganda-like speech to his empty chair. Some 'good' Germans opposed to Hitler (they all speak English with American accents) whisk Elsa back to England in a stolen plane. She is hailed as a heroine only to discover that the "lucky charm" she took with her was part of a job-lot of glass eyes! An absolutely priceless movie, and one which at the end is dedicated to the fighting US forces overseas. One can only wonder what they made of it.

The plot has more holes than Swiss cheese, yet the story and Lanchester's character charge continually and inexorably forward. Can't imagine how this got dreamed up, but it makes for a cute fast-paced farcical fantasy. Not a great film or even a good film, yet Lanchester's presentation brings a mix of Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball to the loony scrubwoman who believes she is magically protected from all harm, even while everything and everyone is getting blown up all around her. She has a plucky determination and dedication to her cause, and blithely strolls down streets of London while bombs are dropping all around her; makes her way 1,000 miles across Europe with no money, no ID papers and no prearranged confederates to check in with and receive assistance from, in record time; and even barks orders to Nazis while she is being held prisoner by them. Once she sets out on this quest, you can't stop watching to see where it leads her and how she will continue unscathed, even though we all know none of it can succeed. Luckily, as silly as it is, it does not waste a great deal of our time.

Among the supporting players, Gordon Oliver was adequately heroic in demeanor as a German officer who was also a resistance agent with nothing of importance to actually do; Lionel Royce as a high ranking loyal German officer talked an appropriately menacing game, but left the actual violence to his underlings, and Gavin Muir was sufficiently complex as the English public propaganda mouthpiece for the Reich with wavering loyalties. You can definitely find worse ways to spend a little over an hour of your life.