Sacrificio supremo

Merle Oberon and Brian Aherne star in First Comes Courage," a 1943 film directed by Dorothy Arzner.

Oberon plays Nicole Larsen, a Norwegian who is seen by the other townspeople as a traitor because she's dating a Nazi (Carl Esmond). In truth, she's using him to get information to the underground. When a British beau is smuggled into the country, he is later captured, and she has to get him away from the Nazis.

Merle Oberon was underrated as an actress. She does a terrific job here (as she often did elsewhere), especially in a big, dramatic scene toward the end.

"First Comes Courage" is one of many propaganda films released during the war, and one of several that dealt with the presence of the Nazis in Norway, where politician Quisling helped the Nazis conquer his own country.

Not great, but okay.

Dorothy Arzner's last directorial effort is replete with her usual feminist slant on things as Merle Oberon -- playing a Norwegian -- is caught between romantic Nazi officer Carl Esmond, who wants to marry her and British spy Brian Aherne who loves her, which is all a great inconvenience to her winning the war for Norway. The men are busy playing with their big tanks and their large meetings -- the state marriage of Esmond and Oberon with its TRIUMPH OF THE WILL sized set decorations is very funny. The occasional battlefield shots looks to me like they are modeled on those sets of plastic soldiers that used to be advertised on the back of comic books.

Oberon, appropriately enough, seems to spend much of her time trying to keep a straight face as Esmond tries to romance her into marriage. It fits neatly into the sort of movie that Arzner used to direct Ruth Chatterton in in the early 1930s, but here, deprived of her favorite screenwriter, Zoe Akins, and forced into the confines of wartime propaganda, she still manages to get in the occasional sly dig.

Every bit as good as "Commandos Strike At Dawn" and WWII films made while the war was still going on tend to a very good watch. Merle was very "cool" as she would be described these days, and very elegant.

I know someone who is half Norwegian with his father having travelled to Scotland on the "Shetland Bus" which was fishing boats, at great risk to the crew, that transported Allied personnel from Norway to Shetland, and the other way of course. Norway did a lot to fight the Germans even after occupation unlike that country famous for the capital having a large steel tower in the middle of it.

Highly recommended to watch.

The film is so much better than the book. You can better understand the motivations and limitations of the characters. This movie has been quite a favorite of mine.

Dismissed by the late David Shipman as 'idiotic' and given short shrift by the eminent female critic C. A. Lejeune, 'First Comes Courage' is familiar today largely as the final title in Dorothy Arzner's filmography. Seemingly marking a striking departure with the romantic dramas she was associated with during the twenties & thirties since it comprises one of the fast-growing genre of dramas depicting the resistance in Europe, it's not quite the radical break with her earlier work it might initially seem since Arzner subsequently made training films for the Womens Army Corps before leaving Hollywood for good.

Those studying this film for evidence of female empowerment will be gratified to notice that it was edited like many of her previous films by a woman, while Merle Oberon's dismissal of Nazis as "All of you are weak, cowardly, little people!" evokes the scene where Maureen O'Hara turns on the men in her audience in 'Dance, Girl, Dance'. An interesting subtext is further provided by the presence of Isobel Elsom as a doctor also shown as connected to the resistance; while the disapproving looks Oberon receives from other Norwegian women eloquently demonstrates what the locals thought of horizontal collaboration.