Val Lewton's second non horror at RKO apart from Youth Gone Wild is a more realised effort - it doesn't feel cut about. Yet the public didn't go for it either.
The low budget was blamed though it's still a decent looking film. I wonder if maybe it was also:
- lack of star power. There's Simone Simon. That's about it. Tom Conway would've helped.
- possibly too foreign. The Franco Prussian War isn't very well known - surely this was the case in 1944. Maybe a good old map and narration outlining the situation would've hlped, ie. the Germans invaded, French were under occupation. Though also the situation isn't that analogous because the Germans weren't in France was long were they? And didn't France start that war?
- too many characters. Odd thing to say for a low budget film. But some characters are easy to identify - lecherous German officer, proud prostitute, French guy who is political (undercast John Emery)... but the rest, the French passnegers who go with the flow, all seem the same. There's like six of them or something, three couples, who all seem identical (one is played by Alan Napier). And there's identical Germans. In Stagecoach this didn't matter because all the characters were so different - gambler, alcoholic doctor, pregnant woman, stuffy banker, weedy dude. Seriously, this would've been better with the cast halved.
- the coach people are thrown away in the last act and it becomes about Emery and Simon. Could not they have used the support characters? There's all this stuff about ringing a bell.
In fairness, if Lewton had been able to get some of his original casting - Eric Von Stroheim as the German, George Sanders as the freedom fighter... this would've been better.
But you know it would've been better with Tom Conway and Jean Brooks instead of Emery and Simon.
Anyway, this isn't bad. It's better than Youth Runs Wild. It is just cluttered and confusing when it needn't have been.
It is cool that a Simon stabs a German to death and isn't captured.
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