The Hour Before the Dawn

I was unaware of this film till I found it on youtube.Initially I viewed it because of my interest in Veronica Lake.However I became more interested by the strange view of Britain at war.As an alien from an enemy country Lake would have been interned.Tone as an objector would probably have been asked to serve as a non combatant,eg a medic.There were no spy rings in Britain. Lake is miscast as a refugee and I would agree that this marks the beginning of her decline both personally and professionally.

Franchot Tone is a teacher from a landed country family in England. As the events in Europe unroll, from the Anschluss through the seizing of the Sudetenland, he remains a staunch and reasoned pacifist. He loves England, but will not kill. When Britain declares war, he seeks and obtains Conscientious Objector status, and goes to work on a nearby farm. What he does not know is that the woman he loves, Veronica Lake, is not just an Austrian refugee. She is a Nazi spy.

It's a competent wartime programmer from the solid director Frank Tuttle, filled with the British Colony actors: Binnie Barnes, Henry Stephenson, Phillip Merivale and others. There are some nice performances, especially Miss Barnes as a former entertainer who calms the children during an air raid by leading them in performing "Roll Out the Barrel" to a player piano. Miss Lake is also very good, playing her role very quietly. It's not a world-beater of a movie, but a very well-done effort.

WW2 film about a conscientious objector (Franchot Tone) and his girlfriend (Veronica Lake), an ineffectual German spy. Mostly talked about today, if at all, for Lake's bad performance and how this film hurt her career. Her accent is admittedly very poor. Still, I enjoy this one. The objector plot with Tone is interesting and Lake has some exciting scenes. Good support from Binnie Barnes, Henry Stephenson, and John Sutton. The worst part of the film is the little kid played by David Leland. He would make anyone join the enemy.

Veronica Lake is the major character here, as sweet and lovely as ever, it is impossible to suspect her of anything irregular, she is perfectly adorable as an Austrian refugee having got out of Austria just in time before Anschluss and working as a governess with one of the most influential families in England, which is all on purpose. One of the sons, Franchot Tone in one of his best parts, is a conscientious objector with perfectly good reasons for it, carrying on a difficult trauma since childhood which serves as an introduction to the film, so we have to understand and respect his pacifism, even when the Second World War breaks out. He is in love with the fair governess with the irresistible German accent, and she wraps him up round her little finger, until his nephew by accident finds her out, which completely turns the tables. Somerset Maugham was one of the most expert psychological writers ever, and he was especially sharp about ladies. Franchot Tone's conversion from an inveterate pacifist to an implacable murderer and then to an Air Force pilot makes perfect sense, although he was just a teacher with the best possible merits. The film is made like an efficient thriller, but there is much more underneath which no film version can really make real or include.

In the mid 1920s, English gentlemen Jim Hetherton (Franchot Tone) meets and marries Austrian refugee, Dora Bruckmann (Veronica Lake). Little does he know that she's a Nazi sympathizer and as the years pass, she harbors dreams of German conquest.

When the Second World War approaches, Jim has difficulty because he's an avowed pacifist. What he doesn't know is that through the war his wife works to undermine her adoptive nation and she actually never loved him but chose him because he was a pacifist. After all, she and the other Nazi agents believe that they'll need useful idiots like Jim to run the newly conquered Britain. This puts Jim in a tight spot...should he be loyal to his wife or country?

Overall, while I had a bit of difficulty accepting Lake as a Nazi*, the film was a very effective propaganda piece--the sort of thing needed to encourage folks in the war effort. Well made and worth seeing.

*In her last film, a god-awful mess called "Flesh Feast", the aging Lake once again played an evil Nazi.