A film made for Errol Flynn’s production company though still under the Warners umbrella – hence the presence of Raoul Walsh behind the camera and Paul Lukas in front of it. Errol is excellently cast as a career criminal who pretends to seek redemption during World War Two before becoming (inevitably) a genuine hero.
The story gets off to a terrific start: Errol refusing to have his neck shaved at the guillotine, escaping due to a bombing raid, being recaptured by Lukas, coming up with the idea to pretend to sacrifice himself on behalf of the resistance in order to buy more time, the complicating factor of the village dowager determined to have someone swing in order to save her son. Then about a third of the way in it all goes haywire – Errol becomes passive and just sort of hangs around romancing a local girl (Jean Sullivan, very bland and a bit too uncomfortably young) waiting for stuff to happen and the plots involving the local dowager and Germans don’t really go anywhere. Passive hero then Lukas gets sick and becomes passive too and the romance between Errol and Sullivan is dull.
So despite some typical vigorous Raoul Walsh direction it isn’t interesting at all til the end, which is actually quite emotional. If they’d nutted out the script problems a bit more this could have been something really special.
No comments:
Post a Comment