Correspondant de guerre

This 1942 film by 20th Century Fox, was shown the other night. It is pure propaganda, as many others of the period, when Hollywood was seen as the right medium to advance the cause for the war. Eugene Forde directed this mildly engrossing movie that although flawed has some surprising good moments.

Best of all is Bill Roberts, our man in Berlin, who transmits his radio broadcast with his own slant, telling what was really happening in spite of the censure he must go through. There is intrigue all over the place, but our hero is wiser than the people that are trying to get him. The plot involves some spying from a woman that Bill doesn't suspect is the daughter of his contact in Berlin, who sees the light when she learns her father has been imprisoned because of his illegal activities.

Dana Andrews is good as Bill Roberts, the American correspondent in Berlin. Virginia Gilmore is his love interest. Martin Koleck is perfect as Capt. von Rau, and Mona Maris does a good job portraying the bad Nazi girl.

The film is entertaining and while it doesn't break new ground, will keep the viewer entertained because of the good direction from Mr. Forde.

BERLIN CORRESPONDENT was one of many propaganda films that entertained World War II audiences in 1942. When it played the local theater houses in the New York area during the age of double features, BAMBI was on the top half of the bill with the DANA ANDREWS film second on the bill.

It's got a really improbable storyline but if you can accept the fact that this is "just a movie" and made for propaganda escapist fare in the early '40s, it's well worth watching.

Dana Andrews is excellent as an American reporter who risks his life so that his sweetheart and her professor father can escape the Nazis. By the time the story gets to the concentration camp scenes near the end, it has compiled a number of improbable twists and turns. Nevertheless, it's briskly paced, well acted and photographed in crisp B&W style that results in good entertainment. The story moves to a fast-moving climax when Dana's planned escape goes amok.

Martin Kosleck makes the most of his Nazi role, the kind he played often in these wartime dramas, and Virginia Gilmore is pleasantly appealing in the leading femme role. Mona Maris seemed to specialize in playing bad girl spies in these kind of stories.

Taut, tense and exciting, flawed only by some improbabilities in the script.

What Clark Gable was doing the Soviets in Comrade X Dana Andrews is doing to the Nazis in Berlin Correspondent. Of course Comrade X was a far better film.

This quickie from 20th Century Fox takes place starting in the summer of 1941 when the Nazis broke their pact with the Soviet Union and invaded. Dana Andrews is broadcasting to America with strict supervision, but still manages to get news in print to his home paper in New York that is too accurate for Nazi taste. This has the Gestapo most concerned and Martin Kosleck sends in his own girlfriend Virginia Gilmore to find out.

What she does find out hits home because her father Erwin Kalser is one of the helpers. She does a 180 degree spin and falls for Andrews and the rest is for you to watch.

This is one of those films from the WW2 years which makes the Nazis out to be ludicrously stupid. They weren't all Wilhelm Klink's or they would not have done what they did. You have to marvel at what our concept of a concentration camp was before they were liberated and how easily Andrews escapes.

Sig Ruman and Kurt Katch are also stupid Nazis in this film and Mona Maris is a jealous Nazi girl who has her own war with Gilmore to fight.

Berlin Correspondent is a mediocre remnant of World War II days and hardly likely to be in the Dana Andrews top 10.

This was actually entertaining. The acting was quite good, and there was suspense and humor. The pace was just right -- not too frenetic, but it moved right along. The low budget was betrayed mostly by the sets. The concentration camp was obviously left over from a Western cowboy movie set. Log cabin watch towers? Also, the entrance to the camp looked like something from "F Troop." When a plane takes off from a supposed Nazi airfield, the buildings around the field look suspiciously like the sound stages on movie lots.

I also noticed the Hans Gruber name -- it was actually the name of the stamp shop being used by the hero and the heroine's father to pass secret information.

I actually liked that the Nazi colonel's secretary (who was secretly in love him) was not the stereotype that I expected, and her role was not what I expected either.

... with Dana Andrews in an early role, a couple of years before Laura.

American correspondent Bill Roberts (Dana Andrews) broadcasts live from Berlin in late 1941 before Pearl Harbor. You'd wonder WHY he does this since he has about three or four Germans huddled around him every time he broadcasts to make sure he says only positive happy sappy things about Germany. And then you find out why he doesn't just quit and go home. He has been discovering German secrets and inserting those secrets in code inside of his broadcasts. In America these secrets are translated and sent on to our allies in Europe.

The Germans know he is doing this, and they don't just kick him out of the country because they want to know his source. They've tried numerous detectives and PI's but Bill has spotted them all. So a colonel in the SS gets his girlfriend in the Gestapo to act as a damsel in distress in a restaurant so that Bill can ride to her rescue, and then she can strike up a friendship with Bill and worm her way into his confidence. It works all too well - he is a bit smitten - and she gets the info. This leads the Gestapo back to - her own father! And she was the one telling him the secrets! Yikes!

This is all disclosed early on, so I'm not really spoiling it for you. This was not one of Fox's A list productions AND it has that typical WWII era production preachy shrillness to it, but it does have a few points to recommend it. For one, I don't think I've seen an impressionist/voice actor or a Gestapo love triangle inserted into such a film before as significant plot points.

Also, as much as American films played up the evil side of the Third Reich even early in the war, they were still quite uninformed at this point. They knew there were concentration camps where German political prisoners were kept, but they gave the Nazis too much credit for compassion. The camp shown here has the prisoners looking well fed and looks no worse than a deep south prison of the era that employed chain gangs - although I'm not saying that was not pretty bad.

The end is rather interesting in that it is reminiscent of Casablanca in several ways, down to the irony and a pseudo "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" kind of moment. The thing is, this film came first!

I'd recommend it. It is not long enough to get tiresome, is original in spots, and you get to see Dana Andrews in an early role.