Pastor Hall

"Pastor Hall" is a bold, very early attempt to expose the Nazi regime. Halliwell's Film Guide gives the film a measly one star rating, which only goes to prove one should not believe everything one reads in print. It is, as Halliwell says, a "courageous film of its time" but in direct opposition to Halliwell, it is VERY interesting dramatically. Cinematically, the film works and considering budget constraints, it is an admirable production for 1939 (released 1940). It is also a great example of British film making for the period.

It's greatest flaw is arguably the upper class English accents. An interesting thing happens once one is drawn into the film, however: because the accents are a constant, it becomes a dramatic convention that one accepts. In other words, it does not detract from the dramatic impact of the social statement that the film makes. It also lends the film a timeless quality to the moral values it underlines - making the film surprisingly relevant for the 21st century viewer.

Historically, it a very important film. Made before the full horrors of the concentration camps were known, "Pastor Hall" is the first film to deal with the issue of the Nazi concentration camps. Fortunatley, I have a copy that I taped off air several years ago, and the image quality is better than a lot of digital transfers I've seen.

This film should be revived. I'd run "Pastor Hall" as a main feature, and run Alain Resnais' stark 1955 documentary masterpiece, "Nuit Et Brouillard" (Night and Fog) right afterwards. Both films should be required viewing for the film student.

• If you found this 'mini-review' helpful, then please checkout my full length IMDb reviews, written for post-viewing discussion with live audiences. This postscript added 21st June 2006.

This is Wilfrid Lawson's life performance, and no one could have made it more convincing and heart-warming. The Lutheran pastor Niemuller and his ordeal was a true story, and the most impressing thing about this film is that it exposés all the horrors of the German concentration camps already at the initiation of the war. The films of the Boulting brothers are always more than interesting in their keen concentration on vital problems of reality, and this film was one of their earliest, already marking their special knack for controversial realism. Nova Pilbeam is perfect as the daughter, and so is Marius Goring as the abominable leading Nazi. Other important characters are Bernard Miles as the pastor's faithful disciple joining the SS and taking the consequences - another important tragedy of the tale. The film was made as an exclamation mark for a warning of what was going on, and as such it is valid for all times - there are always new dictatorships, and they are all of the same sort, beginning constructively and then turning gradually to oppression. cruelty and madness. A timeless masterpiece, valid for all times.

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.

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.

I know the term: based on a true story , and it does not say anything about the true nature of the story itself .

The real story is that Niemuller was at first an anthousiastic follower of adolf hitler and later on realized that the man was not what he pretended to be .

So niemuller became very critical and that resulted in an arrest and at first he was sent to sachsenhausen and later to dachau where he spent most of his time in the political prison building called the bunker ( cells for one person only ).

By my knowledge there was never an escape , that was nearly impossible .

This movie (minus some cruelty examples ) does not represent the life at the camp at all .

To make a movie about a prisoner at 1940 while he still is there for 5 years to come is beyond me and does not do his story any justice .