Pastor Hall

This is quite a gruelling film to watch, this one. Wilfrid Lawson is the eponymous minister who lived in a small German village in the 1930s as the Nazi party started on it's inevitable route to power. A decent man, he tried to resist the increasingly anti-semitic aspirations of the Party but with the arrival of some stormtroopers under the command of the malevolent, but cunning, "Gerte" (Marius Goring) his task becomes much harder and his own safety, and that of his young daughter "Christine" (Nova Pilbeam) looks more and more precarious. It's based on a true character, and the story has an authenticity to it that papers over the cracks left by the limitations of an early wartime production with what I assume was a modest budget. Lawson is very effective in the title role, as are Goring and Pilbeam and there is an interesting contribution from Seymour Hicks as "Gen. Von Grotjahn" - a German general officer from days gone by when honour and respect meant more than any loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Eventually sent to Dachau, the history takes quite an interesting turn at an end that I found immensely satisfying on a number of fronts. The narrative does try to explain a little of just how these fascist thugs won over an otherwise benign population - fear, lies, rumour, gossip and resentment all playing a part in galvanising a population into a complicit inactivity that allowed persecution and brutality on a scale that they knew little about, but about which they cared even less. Out of sight... etc. There is a particularly harrowing storyline featuring the young "Lina" (Lina Barrie) which rather summed the whole thing up - and showed the bravery and decency of this man of not just God, but of his congregation too. Rarely seen nowadays, but thought-provoking and well worth ninety minutes if you ever come across it.

This is Wilfrid Lawson's life performance, and no one could have made it more convincing and heart-warming. The Lutheran pastor Niemuller and his ordeal was a true story, and the most impressing thing about this film is that it exposés all the horrors of the German concentration camps already at the initiation of the war. The films of the Boulting brothers are always more than interesting in their keen concentration on vital problems of reality, and this film was one of their earliest, already marking their special knack for controversial realism. Nova Pilbeam is perfect as the daughter, and so is Marius Goring as the abominable leading Nazi. Other important characters are Bernard Miles as the pastor's faithful disciple joining the SS and taking the consequences - another important tragedy of the tale. The film was made as an exclamation mark for a warning of what was going on, and as such it is valid for all times - there are always new dictatorships, and they are all of the same sort, beginning constructively and then turning gradually to oppression. cruelty and madness. A timeless masterpiece, valid for all times.

This is a fine film which essentially chronicles the early takeover of Germany by the Nazi Party. It tells the true story of a German pastor who stands up to the Nazi Machine. In many ways it tells the early story of the origins of resistance movements to totalitarian and evil regimes. It also is well acted and realistically portrayed. It unfortunately is extremely rare.

Although the title role of Pastor Hall is played by Wilfrid Lawson, and he is undoubtedly the star of this film, he gets billing below both Nova Pilbeam and Sir Seymour Hicks, but above Marius Goring, in the credits. Unfair it may be, but everyone is so good in this film that it rather precludes any attempt to fight for star billing for a particular performer. Many years back, someone who knew about such things (it may have been Olivier) called Wilfrid Lawson the supreme British character actor of his time. It is almost impossible to look at him as the almost beatific Pastor Hall and quite believe that only one year earlier he had played (better than anyone else, ever) the highly disreputable father of Eliza Doolittle in the Leslie Howard-Wendy Hiller "Pygmalion" and a rather sinister fellow in "The Terror". While his turn in "Pygmalion" is probably his most famous film performance (and he was on screen from 1931 through his death in 1966), his Pastor Hall is probably the best thing he ever did on the screen. The other actors are his equal in all but the difficulty of the roles assigned to them. A grown up Nova Pilbeam, who is best remembered for her teenage performances in two Hitchcock films ("The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "Young and Innocent") gives what is surely her best performance in her somewhat aborted film career (seventeen films in nineteen years) as the pastor's very intelligent and brave daughter, and the venerable and quite legendary Sir Seymour Hicks as an old retired General is suitably huffy, puffy and good-humored throughout, but is incredibly moving in the tear-inducing final moment of his performance. Marius Goring, who was wonderful as cold-hearted villains, mentally unstable young men, good-hearted leading men and ineffectual weaklings (rather like a British Richard Basehart) is at his coldest here as the leader of a Storm Trooper brigade assigned to bring the town in which he is stationed into line with National Socialist policies. He is such a superb actor that, although he remains totally villainous throughout the film, we see the facade of his villainy wilt for a furtive moment when receiving a much-deserved tongue-lashing from Pastor Hall in front of the Pastor's fellow concentration camp inmates. Only great film actors can make a moment like that tell the way it does here. There is also a young Bernard Miles (later Lord Miles), very moving as a Storm Trooper guard at the concentration camp who had known Pastor Hall in better days. But there simply isn't a role in the film that isn't beautifully handled. Indeed, in its own way it is as perfectly cast as "Casablanca" was a few years later. And, if anyone has a problem with the British accents, at least everyone in the film has the same one, and no one ever complained about such things when Alexander Knox or John Carradine played villainous-but-unaccented Germans in American wartime films (and let us not forget that, in a total hodgepodge of accents in "Casablanca", Claude Rains, not eschewing his glorious British heritage for a moment, played to perfection the very French Captain Renault with the most wonderful British accent to be heard short of hiring John Gielgud for the part). Anyhow, if I have seen any film in the past year that is more unjustly forgotten than "Pastor Hall", I can't recall it; but even if the picture were less worthy than I think it is, it would still be worth viewing just for the wonderful actors doing some of their very best work in it.

"Pastor Hall" is a bold, very early attempt to expose the Nazi regime. Halliwell's Film Guide gives the film a measly one star rating, which only goes to prove one should not believe everything one reads in print. It is, as Halliwell says, a "courageous film of its time" but in direct opposition to Halliwell, it is VERY interesting dramatically. Cinematically, the film works and considering budget constraints, it is an admirable production for 1939 (released 1940). It is also a great example of British film making for the period.

It's greatest flaw is arguably the upper class English accents. An interesting thing happens once one is drawn into the film, however: because the accents are a constant, it becomes a dramatic convention that one accepts. In other words, it does not detract from the dramatic impact of the social statement that the film makes. It also lends the film a timeless quality to the moral values it underlines - making the film surprisingly relevant for the 21st century viewer.

Historically, it a very important film. Made before the full horrors of the concentration camps were known, "Pastor Hall" is the first film to deal with the issue of the Nazi concentration camps. Fortunatley, I have a copy that I taped off air several years ago, and the image quality is better than a lot of digital transfers I've seen.

This film should be revived. I'd run "Pastor Hall" as a main feature, and run Alain Resnais' stark 1955 documentary masterpiece, "Nuit Et Brouillard" (Night and Fog) right afterwards. Both films should be required viewing for the film student.

• If you found this 'mini-review' helpful, then please checkout my full length IMDb reviews, written for post-viewing discussion with live audiences. This postscript added 21st June 2006.