A Hora Antes do Amanhecer

Surely not the greatest antiwar picture ever made but hardly as bad as its reputation suggests.

Veronica is a Nazi agent pretending to be an exile from her country who has managed to wheedle her way into wealthy Binnie Barnes good graces. As Binnie's personal maid she manages to also ingratiate herself with the prestigious and politically connected family Binnie has married into. Their pacifist son, Franchot Tone, falls for her which she again uses to her advantage when the cell she's involved in call on her to strike.

Not a top notch Maugham adaptation but it tells its wartime story efficiently, if with a minimum of action. Veronica's career took a big hit when this failed at the box office with the critics and studio assigning most of the blame to her. Hard to see why though.

She's not as assured as in her best films but she doesn't embarrass herself. Her accent is variable but you'll have definitely heard worse in other films and the lack of her signature hairstyle can be laid at the feet of the government's request for her to change it. It was during the filming of this picture that she tripped over a cable causing a miscarriage and her absence from the screen for a period of time. With the failure of this film and no immediate one to follow it up and regain ground the studio apparently lost faith in her and started casting her in fluffy junk that quickly lead to her career default. It surely didn't help that she had a reputation for being difficult, stemming from an untreated bi-polar disorder, and was unpopular at Paramount. A shame though since even miscast as she is here she still has a powerful screen presence and holds the viewers eye whenever she's in a scene.

As for the rest of the film, Tone and the always welcome Binnie Barnes make the most of their parts but the direction lacks focus which even with the short running time allows the film to become slack at times.

Have done for a while highly appreciated W Somerset Maugham's work, some may find it old-fashioned but to me his sharp prose, insight and witticisms delight. Can absolutely see why his work is celebrated and do wish it was adapted more. Also have liked Veronica Lake in other things, especially in 'This Gun for Hire', 'I Married a Witch', 'The Blue Dahlia' and 'Sullivan's Travels'. Franchot Tone has also been good elsewhere, though in the right role.

Sadly, 'The Hour Before the Dawn' is not a great, or even good, representation of either or of most people involved. Even the few that come off well have done better things. The source material is a lesser Maugham effort in the first place and that is betrayed in how 'The Hour Before the Dawn' adapts it, which is pretty badly. Others have said that it is considered one of the films that started Lake's decline and while not her very worst film it is one of her worst and contains one of her worst performances.

Very few films out there are irredeemable, and 'The Hour Before the Dawn' is not an irredeemable film. It has its moments. It looks pretty good, it has a nice moody atmosphere in the lighting and in the photography as well. Have always admired Miklos Rozsa as a film composer, one of my first exposures to him being his wonderful score for Alfred Hitchcock's 'Spellboound', and it is as haunting as ever, in a way that's both eerie and melancholic.

Most of the acting was not good at all, but Binnie Barnes does a good job with the rendition of "Roll Out the Barrel" being a welcome bit of levity. The film does come to life at the end, where there is finally some energy and suspense. A shame that it took so long to get there.

Lake however was clearly taxed by her role and no it was not just her struggles with the accent. The character feels sketchy here and confuses, and Lake didn't seem to know what she was doing, sometimes resorting to histrionics and most of the time looking bored. Tone is better and his character intrigues more and confuses less, but the role needed an actor that had a lot more hard-boiled edge with Tone spending quite a lot of the time looking bemused. The rest of the acting doesn't register in one-dimensional parts. The direction is pretty pedestrian, especially in the too long to get going early portions.

The story is very dull a vast majority of the time, often uneventful and with a severe lack of tension or suspense. Further disadvantaged by over-obvious twists and a subtlety of a sledgehammer heavy-handedness. The characters completely lack depth, uncharacteristic of Maugham, with the writers clearly being at sea as to what to do with Lake's character. The script has none, or should we say very little, of Maugham's characteristic sharpness, wit, insight and sincere prose, one could easily have mistaken the film for being an adaptation of a story written by another author and an inexperienced one at that.

Overall, disappointing. 4/10

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.

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.

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.