A Hora Antes do Amanhecer

In the mid 1920s, English gentlemen Jim Hetherton (Franchot Tone) meets and marries Austrian refugee, Dora Bruckmann (Veronica Lake). Little does he know that she's a Nazi sympathizer and as the years pass, she harbors dreams of German conquest.

When the Second World War approaches, Jim has difficulty because he's an avowed pacifist. What he doesn't know is that through the war his wife works to undermine her adoptive nation and she actually never loved him but chose him because he was a pacifist. After all, she and the other Nazi agents believe that they'll need useful idiots like Jim to run the newly conquered Britain. This puts Jim in a tight spot...should he be loyal to his wife or country?

Overall, while I had a bit of difficulty accepting Lake as a Nazi*, the film was a very effective propaganda piece--the sort of thing needed to encourage folks in the war effort. Well made and worth seeing.

*In her last film, a god-awful mess called "Flesh Feast", the aging Lake once again played an evil Nazi.

Franchot Tone is a teacher from a landed country family in England. As the events in Europe unroll, from the Anschluss through the seizing of the Sudetenland, he remains a staunch and reasoned pacifist. He loves England, but will not kill. When Britain declares war, he seeks and obtains Conscientious Objector status, and goes to work on a nearby farm. What he does not know is that the woman he loves, Veronica Lake, is not just an Austrian refugee. She is a Nazi spy.

It's a competent wartime programmer from the solid director Frank Tuttle, filled with the British Colony actors: Binnie Barnes, Henry Stephenson, Phillip Merivale and others. There are some nice performances, especially Miss Barnes as a former entertainer who calms the children during an air raid by leading them in performing "Roll Out the Barrel" to a player piano. Miss Lake is also very good, playing her role very quietly. It's not a world-beater of a movie, but a very well-done effort.

Pacifist Franchot Tone marries émigré (!?) Veronica Lake. Franchot won't go to war. Veronica is fighting a clandestine war for Adolf Hitler. Will Franchot survive the mental trauma of THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN of his consciousness that fair Veronica has been up too Nazi accented no good?

Usually, a Somerset Maugham story will adapt well to the screen, and offers its actors to play a character of a little more depth than usual. While Franchot, playing a pacifist of real principles, gets a good role (and does well with it), somebody at Paramount really had it in for Veronica Lake (or, at least, her star image), and she is stuck with a cardboard Nazi to play, and, rather shockingly, some of the most convoluted hair styles ever. I guess Washington was serious, when they decreed that the Lake hairstyle (which, when imitated, allegedly got caught in factory machinery) was a threat to the war effort. Because, there is no peekaboo hair here. Just Pipp Longstocking braids, wound around her head in odd patterns.

The plot here is how a decent guy and pacifist come around to being a bomber pilot, taking the war to the Nazis. It's all rather corny, unfortunately, and some of the plot twists belong in a Repubic serial, rather than a picture that is intended to be serious.

Though many people reckon that THBTD marked the start of Veronica Lake's decline, I thought that she was very good in this film, departing from the peek-a-boo image projected in her other films that I've seen. In fact I found her more attractive with her German-style hair. And some of her muted facial reactions were very good.

But I concede that this production could not be described as a career highlight for any of those involved. The backdrops showing English countryside were very basic and of the rest of the cast I knew only Franchot Tone. And the three main settings - the big house, the airfield and the farm buildings seemed to be extremely close together.

The plot was fair enough, though I did wonder about how one character ended up where he did given his action at the end of the film.

Veronica Lake is the major character here, as sweet and lovely as ever, it is impossible to suspect her of anything irregular, she is perfectly adorable as an Austrian refugee having got out of Austria just in time before Anschluss and working as a governess with one of the most influential families in England, which is all on purpose. One of the sons, Franchot Tone in one of his best parts, is a conscientious objector with perfectly good reasons for it, carrying on a difficult trauma since childhood which serves as an introduction to the film, so we have to understand and respect his pacifism, even when the Second World War breaks out. He is in love with the fair governess with the irresistible German accent, and she wraps him up round her little finger, until his nephew by accident finds her out, which completely turns the tables. Somerset Maugham was one of the most expert psychological writers ever, and he was especially sharp about ladies. Franchot Tone's conversion from an inveterate pacifist to an implacable murderer and then to an Air Force pilot makes perfect sense, although he was just a teacher with the best possible merits. The film is made like an efficient thriller, but there is much more underneath which no film version can really make real or include.