Dangerously They Live

This movie should have been right up my alley. I love John Garfield. And love WW2 stories. But the tone is absolutely dopey. The terrible music is wall to wall. And the lead actress is one dimensional. Instead of being a Hitchcock it plays out with the depth of a 50s sitcom. Even Garfield looks lost and embarrassed. The worst part is that beats are played out over and over again. It's flat, silly, repetitious. The real culprit driving the badness is the actress. Nancy Coleman is it? She has no nuances. Delivers everything the same way. Painful. No wonder she didn't make it. Anyway that's enough.

John Garfield is an intern who cares for a young accident victim in "Dangerously They Live," also starring Nancy Coleman, Raymond Massey, and Moroni Olson.

This looks like a B movie and is certainly short enough to have been a second feature. This is what Warners put John Garfield in after he made a big splash in "Four Daughters?" Jack Warner must have been punishing him for something.

The accident victim in this film, Jane Graystone, played by Coleman, is thought to have amnesia. She is actually a spy for the U. S., and the Nazis are after information she has about a convoy in New Zealand.

Moroni Olson poses as her father, a Mr. Goodwin, but she tells Dr. Lewis (Garfield) the true story and asks for his help. Garfield is a little waylaid, however, when one of his teachers, Dr. Ingersoll (Raymond Massey) appears as a doctor on the case.

He doesn't realize Ingersoll is part of the Nazi team. Ingersoll allows Dr. Lewis to come "home" with Jane - but home seems more like a prison.

Massey turns in an excellent performance and is quite scary as Ingersoll. Coleman, who went on to have a career in television, is pretty, reminiscent of Barbara Rush or Piper Laurie in their youths. However, she's not as good an actress as either of those women.

Garfield is appealing but this is not his kind of role. It would be a few more years before he would be given parts more suited to his abilities. Fortunately, he'd have about five years of excellent roles before the blacklist and his early death.

Though the movie was made right before Pearl Harbor, the handwriting was on the wall for the U. S. The theme of Nazis in our midst was in several films of that time, including "All Through the Night."

In New York City, mysterious men maneuver Jane Graystone (Nancy Coleman) into a specific taxi. It's a kidnapping but it goes wrong when the taxi gets into an accident. She is brought to the hospital where Dr. Mike Lewis (John Garfield) treats her for amnesia. She's faking. She reveals that she's actually a British agent being pursued by Nazi agents for secret information in her head.

It's a wartime espionage thriller. It's interesting to have this vast Nazi network but it does leave the question of why they don't just kill him. It's also a bit questionable that she is able to hold out against interrogation. I guess they can't actually show them torturing her. I like the threatening atmosphere but it doesn't really feel real. It's not really realistic but it's enough as a wartime thriller for the hungry masses weeks after Pearl Harbor.

Nancy Coleman plays an British agent based in Washington D.C during the Second World War who has some vital information about Allied convoys which

German agents are keen to get their hot and sticky little hands on it and none too scrupulous about how they do it .They capture her but she escapes from their clutches only to be involved in an auto accident which leaves her concussed and with memory loss, Enter John Garfield as the intern in charge of her case .He facilitates her recovery but -suspecting many of the people who claim to know her are in fact Nazi agents -she continues to feign amnesia .She is taken into a private sanatorium by an eminent psychologist ( Raymond Massey ) who is a Nazi agent and which turns out to be a prison in all but name .All the servants and other help are "de facto" wardens and the last part of the movie deals with the attempt of Coleman and Garfield to escape and prevent the bad guys extracting the vital information from them Garfield was unenthusiastic about doing this movie -and agreed to do so only because he could not afford another suspension by the studio .It shows in a lacklustre performance and Raymond Massey has no problem stealing the acting honours in what is a proficient but minor Warner Brothers melodrama -watchable but not exceptional

I was very pleased to finally see this film again after many years. I can never understand why other people complain about the storyline or some of the individual actors in the film or any other irrelevant aspect of the film without properly recognizing its significance. This film was released in 1941 at a time when world peace was being seriously threatened by some of the most evil forces then known to mankind. It was a means of conveying to as many as possible the evils of Nazism at a time when people in America were arguing, loudly by the way, that the country should remain neutral as far as the rest of the world was concerned. How people can, today, quibble about the acting abilities or weaknesses of the story line is beyond me. This was 1941 and films such as this were designed, first and foremost, to make the then-current world situation a reality for those people who didn't seem to know, or even care, about what was happening around them. In that respect, it succeeds magnificently. And how ironic that it should star John Garfield who was so hounded by the treacherous McCarthy era that he died at the unforgivable age of 39!!! Nancy Coleman, who later became the mother of twins, lived across the street from me for many years. One might, perhaps, want to think about just where our world would be today if not for the efforts of all those responsible for this unappreciated film from 1941.