Arise, My Love

This is a good movie, full of snappy lines, very capable acting and interesting scenes. Mitchell Leisen has an above average script to work with, and when this happens you can be assured of a very watchable movie. Well worth a DVD release (can you hear me Universal!), but this inexplicably has never even made it on to VHS.

It features a strong capable woman (a trademark Leisen feature), but her male counterpart is no weakling is either, Ray Milland matches Claudette Colbert all of the way, helping create dramatic interest. The last section of the movie after the sinking of the Athenia is a bit underwritten and slightly unconvincing, but this is only a minor quibble.

Very well worth watching.

Both Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland are superb in this brilliant war comedy drama in the shadow of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War. It was Claudette Colbert's own favourite among her films, and you'll understand some of its qualities better when you study the list of the script writers, one of whom was the young Billy Wilder. The dialog is brilliant all the way, there is any amount of eloquent scenes, and the romance gradually grows quite naturally with some skirmishes along the way. Walter Abel also gives one of his best performances as Claudette Colbert's employer, as he also gets his nose too far out into the business. Claudette Colbert is a journalist who goes to Spain to get out an American prisoner, who awaits his execution. That is Ray Milland, and the very first scene is perhaps the very best one, as Ray Milland sits in his cell waiting for his execution playing cards with a priest, while the firing squad is busy just outside, leaving one body just outside Ray Milland's window in a shadow that won't go away. Add to this the romantic music of Victor Young, which adorns many of the long romance scenes, while gradually the comedy transcends into a major war drama, with some curious coincidences on the way: on the train to Berlin, both Ray and Claudette being together on it, the emergency break is pulled just as the war breaks out, and when Ray and Claudette decide to leave all career thinking behind and go back to America to embark on a normal life, their ship gets torpedoed, and the war starts for real.

It's a delightful and innovative comedy all the way, eloquently mixed with some very serious business, and the film is so positive and edifying, that it would be worth returning to it every once in a while - it's the perfect emergency readiness film.

Mitchell Leisen was one of the few directors who could introduce tragedy into comedy and vice versa .The first part is absolutely dazzling.Incredible though it may seem ,it's full of unexpected twists,of fine lines ("it's my first execution" says the Padre /It's mine too" says the prisoner).The chemistry between Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland is perfect and their husband-and-wife act compares favorably with that of the actress as a "baroness ,her husband and her children" in "midnight" .The movie loses steam in its second part but it does show Mitchell's fondness for France .Unlike too many American movies,there are plenty of French words and the French speak French between them.I particularly like this sentence "Three sisters used to live in this country :Liberté ,Egalité Et Fraternité " as the German army is marching past the streets of Paris.This francophilia is also present in Leisen's "hold back the dawn" or "Frenchman's creek" .

The last third may be considered a propaganda one ,but many other directors (Hitchcock,Lang,Hathaway,Borzage etc) had theirs too,and Leisen's is certainly smarter than most of the others.Solomon's prayer (which provides the title) is to be taken literally.Augusta is a go-getter ,she plays the heroine just for the sake of fame .After the beautiful scene in the forest ,where the animals run for their lives ,she does arise .The scene in the Compiègne Car is as incredible as Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy entering an inn full of Nazis in "golden earrings" .But the Spanish extravagant tale had warned us:this is not to be taken seriously ,but in a way,it is.

An unusually constructed film which starts off like a screwball comedy albeit to the backdrop of both the recently-ended Spanish Civil War and newly-begun Second World War and finishes up as an interventionist call-to-arms against the global threat of Nazism.

I think it works, aided naturally by the writing of the justly celebrated screenwriting partnership of Wilder and Brackett, capable direction of Mitchell Leisen and especially the on-screen chemistry of the emerging Ray Milland and the established Claudette Colbert. You can almost picture the censor of the day's pencil hovering over some of the early scenes in the movie as they coyly play cat-and-mouse with one another, in particular one risqué exchange between the two stars with a double bed prominently featured in the background.

Walter Abel as Colbert's end-of-his-tether editor is rather clichéd but largely speaking, the parts of the lesser characters, such as Milland's two pilot chums and the hotel maid with family caught up in the confusion which add some shade and light to the main characters' motivations are well selected and portrayed.

I particularly appreciated the topicality of the depiction of very recent real-life events such as the sinking by German submarines of the cruise-liner Athenian taking Milland and Colbert back to the States and the montage of succeeding newspaper headlines documenting the at-the-time seemingly unstoppable march of the German Army.

Colbert later named this as her favourite of all her movies and I doubt that's just because the film ended up on the right side of history. It manages that tricky balancing act between comedy and drama in a contemporary setting and still finds room for an eloquent wake-up call to the rest of the world at its time of greatest need.

I loved this film from beginning to end. It made me laugh and it made me cry, and it left me with the feeling that I had watched one of the best screen romances ever. The script was so wonderfully written, the dialogues really sparkled like diamonds and ... Ray Milland was handsomer here than in any other film I have seen him!! He treated Clodette Colbere with a mixture of humor ,tenderness and respect, that was very endearing and touching. At moments, he seemed like an insecure little boy, and I am sure that he was never like that with any other of his co-stars. Needless to say, I loved this aspect of his very much!!! Something else that I found interesting is that the film was made almost simultaneously with the historical events it describes. This adds to its authenticity and gives us a sense of watching history in the making. The mixing of comedy and drama does not annoy me. It is more than realistic and in fact welcome, here. We deal with two very smart and out of the ordinary people, living very unusual lives, taking active parts in what goes on around them, so it is to be expected that they will have an acute sense of humor as well as forceful feelings about the war and about each other. In our lives there is place for both comedy and drama, why it should not be so for a movie, who depicts life? Just to add that the DVD now available, (spanish edition but with English audio)has very good quality of sound and picture, and does justice to this uniquely beautiful film.