Une heure avant l'aube

Surely not the greatest antiwar picture ever made but hardly as bad as its reputation suggests.

Veronica is a Nazi agent pretending to be an exile from her country who has managed to wheedle her way into wealthy Binnie Barnes good graces. As Binnie's personal maid she manages to also ingratiate herself with the prestigious and politically connected family Binnie has married into. Their pacifist son, Franchot Tone, falls for her which she again uses to her advantage when the cell she's involved in call on her to strike.

Not a top notch Maugham adaptation but it tells its wartime story efficiently, if with a minimum of action. Veronica's career took a big hit when this failed at the box office with the critics and studio assigning most of the blame to her. Hard to see why though.

She's not as assured as in her best films but she doesn't embarrass herself. Her accent is variable but you'll have definitely heard worse in other films and the lack of her signature hairstyle can be laid at the feet of the government's request for her to change it. It was during the filming of this picture that she tripped over a cable causing a miscarriage and her absence from the screen for a period of time. With the failure of this film and no immediate one to follow it up and regain ground the studio apparently lost faith in her and started casting her in fluffy junk that quickly lead to her career default. It surely didn't help that she had a reputation for being difficult, stemming from an untreated bi-polar disorder, and was unpopular at Paramount. A shame though since even miscast as she is here she still has a powerful screen presence and holds the viewers eye whenever she's in a scene.

As for the rest of the film, Tone and the always welcome Binnie Barnes make the most of their parts but the direction lacks focus which even with the short running time allows the film to become slack at times.

Have done for a while highly appreciated W Somerset Maugham's work, some may find it old-fashioned but to me his sharp prose, insight and witticisms delight. Can absolutely see why his work is celebrated and do wish it was adapted more. Also have liked Veronica Lake in other things, especially in 'This Gun for Hire', 'I Married a Witch', 'The Blue Dahlia' and 'Sullivan's Travels'. Franchot Tone has also been good elsewhere, though in the right role.

Sadly, 'The Hour Before the Dawn' is not a great, or even good, representation of either or of most people involved. Even the few that come off well have done better things. The source material is a lesser Maugham effort in the first place and that is betrayed in how 'The Hour Before the Dawn' adapts it, which is pretty badly. Others have said that it is considered one of the films that started Lake's decline and while not her very worst film it is one of her worst and contains one of her worst performances.

Very few films out there are irredeemable, and 'The Hour Before the Dawn' is not an irredeemable film. It has its moments. It looks pretty good, it has a nice moody atmosphere in the lighting and in the photography as well. Have always admired Miklos Rozsa as a film composer, one of my first exposures to him being his wonderful score for Alfred Hitchcock's 'Spellboound', and it is as haunting as ever, in a way that's both eerie and melancholic.

Most of the acting was not good at all, but Binnie Barnes does a good job with the rendition of "Roll Out the Barrel" being a welcome bit of levity. The film does come to life at the end, where there is finally some energy and suspense. A shame that it took so long to get there.

Lake however was clearly taxed by her role and no it was not just her struggles with the accent. The character feels sketchy here and confuses, and Lake didn't seem to know what she was doing, sometimes resorting to histrionics and most of the time looking bored. Tone is better and his character intrigues more and confuses less, but the role needed an actor that had a lot more hard-boiled edge with Tone spending quite a lot of the time looking bemused. The rest of the acting doesn't register in one-dimensional parts. The direction is pretty pedestrian, especially in the too long to get going early portions.

The story is very dull a vast majority of the time, often uneventful and with a severe lack of tension or suspense. Further disadvantaged by over-obvious twists and a subtlety of a sledgehammer heavy-handedness. The characters completely lack depth, uncharacteristic of Maugham, with the writers clearly being at sea as to what to do with Lake's character. The script has none, or should we say very little, of Maugham's characteristic sharpness, wit, insight and sincere prose, one could easily have mistaken the film for being an adaptation of a story written by another author and an inexperienced one at that.

Overall, disappointing. 4/10

Though many people reckon that THBTD marked the start of Veronica Lake's decline, I thought that she was very good in this film, departing from the peek-a-boo image projected in her other films that I've seen. In fact I found her more attractive with her German-style hair. And some of her muted facial reactions were very good.

But I concede that this production could not be described as a career highlight for any of those involved. The backdrops showing English countryside were very basic and of the rest of the cast I knew only Franchot Tone. And the three main settings - the big house, the airfield and the farm buildings seemed to be extremely close together.

The plot was fair enough, though I did wonder about how one character ended up where he did given his action at the end of the film.

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.

Pacifist Franchot Tone marries émigré (!?) Veronica Lake. Franchot won't go to war. Veronica is fighting a clandestine war for Adolf Hitler. Will Franchot survive the mental trauma of THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN of his consciousness that fair Veronica has been up too Nazi accented no good?

Usually, a Somerset Maugham story will adapt well to the screen, and offers its actors to play a character of a little more depth than usual. While Franchot, playing a pacifist of real principles, gets a good role (and does well with it), somebody at Paramount really had it in for Veronica Lake (or, at least, her star image), and she is stuck with a cardboard Nazi to play, and, rather shockingly, some of the most convoluted hair styles ever. I guess Washington was serious, when they decreed that the Lake hairstyle (which, when imitated, allegedly got caught in factory machinery) was a threat to the war effort. Because, there is no peekaboo hair here. Just Pipp Longstocking braids, wound around her head in odd patterns.

The plot here is how a decent guy and pacifist come around to being a bomber pilot, taking the war to the Nazis. It's all rather corny, unfortunately, and some of the plot twists belong in a Repubic serial, rather than a picture that is intended to be serious.