Candlelight in Algeria

Candlelight in Algeria from 1944 is a British film about the invasion of North Africa by the Allies. It stars a skinny, mustached James Mason and Carla Lehmann.

Lehmann plays Susan, an American from Kansas who meets Alan (Mason) on the run from the Germans, when he breaks into her house. He asks her to steal a camera which has film showing the meeting place of the Allies to plan the invasion.

When the Germans arrest her, Alan rescues her, but the Germans are in pursuit.

Very good and atmospheric film, with Lehman resembling Meryl Streep in some angles. Mason had a remarkable career in British films before hitting a big over here; in this film, he is a scrappy freedom fighter.

You can get this film from Movies Unlimited. However, it is not 85 minutes long as advertised in IMDb and other places. It's about 63 minutes long, but the story seems complete enough. The interplay between the American heroine and her English secret agent boy friend is snappy and sassy. If you have ever wondered why James Mason was once considered the "Cambridge edition of Clark Gable", then look no further than this film. I particularly like the scenes where he is running around with a fez on his head for no apparently good reason. This was one of three films Mason did where he played the "good" guy (before the Brits figured out he'd be much more of a box office hit playing slightly sadistic anti-heroes). The other two are "Hotel Reserve" and "Secret Mission".

I rated this film 6/10 having discovered it in a rare film emporium in Camden Market, North London, last Sunday.I am a forties film aficionado but had never seen this title before.One thing British/American films constantly do in war films is to assume all German/French characters speak fluent English (to make it easy on audiences who will mostly only speak this language), and this film was no exception, (although marginally less so than most US 40s films of the time).What is especially laughable is when German characters speak in English to other German characters!On the other hand, this 1944 film did not take itself too seriously especially the end scene, when Carla Lehmann describes to James Mason how Hollywood would have filmed the self same scene, (all done to keep up the nation's morale!).A more enlightened treatment of showing various European languages on film is for producers to hire actors German/French who can speak in their own native tongue but then show English sub-titles for that part of the plot as in Darryl F Zanuck's ground breaking epic, "The Longest Day" (1962).

The two US reviewers above seemed to have enjoyed this film, so I suppose it served its purpose however I could not award it more than just above an adequate rating.

This is all adventure while the war is only a decoration. Lovely Carla Lehmann, reminding very much of Carole Lombard, is a very American Kansas girl who accidentally gets mixed up with a brazen English adventurer (James Mason) who has taken some forbidden pictures of some very secret German maps, which he is being chased for as he tries to smuggle them out of Algeria. They team up and eventually end up in the exotic Casbah, where anyone can hide or disappear forever. There is a lot of good humour here, the dialog is flippant and exhilarating, the wit is constantly on a high level and good mood, and Carla is doing surprisingly well. The Germans are not all complete dumbbells here, doktor Muller is quite awesome in his perfect politeness, and the exploration of intriguing environments in Algiers is quite entertaining, and eventually the invasion of North Africa starts rolling on. The spirit of the film is ironic with some detachment, and there are some really hilarious scenes with French and German officers in their very different approach to women. It is not a great film, but it is entertaining enough.

Carla Lehmann wakes in a hospital in North Africa, where she tells a nursing sister of how she met British spy James Mason, stole a camera in Algiers for him and outwitted various nasty Nazis to save the landings at Oran in North Africa.

It's a good, breezy movie directed by George King, who just half a decade earlier had been directed melodramas starring Tod Browning. Now he was telling James Mason, one of Britain's biggest home-grown stars of the period what to do. Mason, however, is not the subject of the movie, and is present for about half of it. Instead, Canadian-born Miss Lehmann carries the show as a quick-witted sculptress from Kansas. She's pretty good, even though the net effect of this movie is a hands-across-the-seas programmer from, say, Universal. The plot borrows liberally from other movies. There's an extensive Casbah segment that suggests PEPE LE MOKO, and a local girl hopelessly in love with Mason, played charmingly by Pamela Stirling; Walter Rilla plays the baddie, even though there isn't much menace in performance; and the Americans are represented, not only by Miss Lehmann, but Bart Norman playing General Mark Clark!

Mason didn't think much of the movie. He later noted that after the war, it was a hit in Bulgaria. Perhaps it's because he wore a mustache for the first half of it.