Pastor Hall

Wilfrid Lawson (Pastor Hall) plays real life German priest Martin Neimuller who was sent to a concentration camp for refusing to follow the Nazi script when it came to preaching from the pulpit. We follow his story as the Nazi party enforce their doctrine on a small German Village, with Marius Goring (Fritz) at the helm. This includes recruiting stormtroopers, bullying the Jewish race and the rape of a 14 year old girl. Can Lawson make a difference or does the regime get him…..?

This film holds the viewer's interest at it puts across the perspective from the German people living within the confines of Nationalist Socialism espoused by Hitler. It doesn't matter that all the accents are British, although Seymour Hicks did make me groan as we get a stereotypical blustery General character. Hang on, Hicks – he's meant to be German. And stop mumbling your lines! Anyway, he redeems himself at the end of the film with a moving humble performance at the village church.

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.

While British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was negotiating with German chancellor Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s resulting in the Munich Agreement, England refrained from criticizing Germany. That all changed once Germany invaded Poland in the autumn of 1939. One of the first British films portraying Germany in a realistically harsh light after World War Two began was May 1940 "Pastor Hall." Based on a 1939 play of the same name by the late German Jewish exile Ernst Toller, the screenplay 'Pastor Hall' was rejected by the British Board of Film Censors before the opening of WW2. The censors claimed the portrayal of a small town in Germany forced by SS Stormtroopers to submit to Nazi ideology would hamper the negotiations Chamberlain was conducting with Hitler. The script was the first to detail the concentration camps rumored to have existed in Germany in the 1930s. Toller, who fled Germany in 1933, was well aware of the events happening internally in his country. He centered his play loosely on Pastor Martin Niemoller, who refused to preach the Nazi doctrine in his church and was sent to Dachau concentration camp for criticizing the Nazi party.

Film reviewer Gary Tooze said "Pastor Hall" was "one of the first anti-Nazi dramas ever made and had its original production delayed by British censors who were told not to be openly critical of Hitler's regime." The strong-armed tactics of the Nazi Germany were personified by the Storm Troopers made up of unemployed young men looking for a regular paycheck. Pastor Frederick Hall (Wilfred Lawson) just wants normalcy for his congregation and the small village he resides. Yet military commander Fritz Gerte (Marius Goring) flexes his swastika-drapped muscles and sends the pastor to a concentration camp after he refuses to adhere to the Nazi's "New Order" talking points at his church.

"Pastor Hall," although not as graphic in its propaganda as those later Hollywood films produced after Pearl Harbor, is a harbinger of what movie audiences would view for the next five years. It proved to be quite a contrast after the years of appeasement when film studios looked upon the lucrative German cinema market as too valuable to lose.

When the Boultings first wanted to make this movie, the British censors turned them down. A movie about the evils of the Nazi regime, they thought in 1938, would be international dynamite: mustn't annoy the German government. After war was declared the following year, however, suddenly it was a good idea. A superb cast was assembled and it was released in May of 1940.

Wilfred Lawson is Pastor Hall, a village parson. When the Storm Troopers show up to get the village moving according to the new dictates, he tries to maintain his gentle form of Christianity. Eventually, however, he comes to realize they are evil and is arrested and thrown into a concentration camp, subject to unspeakable -- barely filmable --bestiality.

Because this is a work of fiction, albeit based on reality, the portrait offered is not that of Niemoller. Niemoller was a fairly typical, conservative churchman, who first opposed the Nazi regime over the political issue of Church independence. His understanding, like Hall's, of the evils, came upon him gradually, and he was arrested in 1938, and spent the entire War in Belsen. After the War, seen as a martyr, he espoused various good causes, and worked to keep the memory of what had happened alive. He died in 1984 at the age of 92.

Used, as I am, to seeing Lawson in eccentric, often comic roles, it is a shock to see him here, speaking in his stage accents. His is not the only fine performance. Seymour Hicks, best remembered for playing Scrooge on stage and in two movies, is superb as a retired general, a friend of the family. Nova Pilbeam is wonderful as Lawson's daughter. Bernard Miles is excellent as a village man who becomes a Storm Trooper because he can use the job, and suffers a crisis when he recognizes Lawson in the concentration camp.

Most shocking of all is that everyone plays their roles as Germans.... as English men and women, with accents appropriate to a small English village. You could argue this was simply a matter of staging. To me it is shocking. Almost eighty years later it seems to say that this could happen in Britain.... or America. I am almost convinced that the Boultings did this deliberately, to serve as a warning. As Kevin Brownlow noted a quarter of a century later, it can happen here.