The Next of Kin

According to IMDB, Winston Churchill wanted to have this film banned. After seeing it, I can understand...though I am glad the movie was shown to British audiences during the war. This is because it's a different sort of war film...one without the usual cliches and with a much higher degree of realism. So realistic in part of the story that the British get their butts kicked by the Germans and a few of the Brits in the story don't act so intelligently or honorably.

The theme in the movie is essentially for military folks to keep their mouths shut and their wits about them, as Nazi agents might be about their country in order to report all that they see to their bosses back in Germany. Again and again through the course of the picture, you see some Brits working hard to stop the German spy apparatus but far more who unwittingly help the enemy through their own stupidity.

I really appreciated how the film passed on an essential message without making the Nazis like the usual snarling villains in war films. I also appreciate how intelligent the script is. In fact, the only things I didn't love about the film was some of its use of stock footage near the end....which is a real shame since they did a great job of creating realistic looking battle scenes. Well worth seeing.

By the way, you can sure tell this was NOT made in Hollywood, as you get a brief glimpse of boobs as well as having a curse word. This is not to say British films of the era had an anything goes style...British censorship was very strong...just not regarding a curse word or showing a book with a bare chested lady on the cover.

Considering I was hitherto unaware of this excellent film prior to it's being shown on "Talking Pictures" tv, what a revelation it was. With a stellar cast and a "careless talk costs lives" propaganda backcloth, this film ticks along nicely and, whilst providing a very serious message also manages to give the viewer a genuine thriller. Some fine performances here and good to see the likes of Jack Hawkins, Nova Pilbeam, Mervyn Johns, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, to mention but a few, getting involved. Overall, a really terrific effort and yet another old British war story that leaves so many more recent movies standing.

As ruthless as it is engrossing, this film deliberately lets us know early on who the spies are so we know precisely when the moments of peril subsequently arise.

There is as usual the dry humour one associates with even the most single-minded British wartime propaganda (some of the peripheral detail is even quite racy, and the wartime censor permitted a reference to cocaine addiction)!

Among a large cast of familiar faces the use of Mary Clare is particularly striking, while Phyllis Stanley is a fox as the film's Mata Hari. But the final scene with two old favourites manages to surpass all that has gone before.

Essential viewing: I would love to know what Goebbels made of it!

I loved this film. It is so genuine, all the persons playing part in it are so very much alive and convincing, that you get under the skin of them all, whether they end up badly or not, even the spies and the crooks. This is not the only war film Winston Churchill wanted to ban, there were a number and several of the best, and this is one of them. Fortunately he didn't succeed in banning any of them.

Especially so long afterwards, 76 years later to be exact, it's immensely rewarding to see such an example of supreme realism all the way, of ordinary people, officers and soldiers, spies and victims, in their very various precarious situations, all under severe pressure, some under threats of death or worse, but all keeping on working and straining themselves for what everyone of them believes is for the best of all. The Germans are not depicted as crooks and villains, they are rather very well objectively filmed, like also the Britishers. They are all doing an extremely difficult job under extreme strain, and this was during the year when the war reached its deepest crisis. It is almost perfectly documentary in character all the way.

When a British army unit is given the task, to attack a vital German U boat base, they know that security has to be 100 per cent. In this semi documentary look at the operation, it is shown how even the smallest remark about the raid , when overheard by German agents, and put together with other clues, will result the raid being a total failure. From one of the officers telling his girlfriend, that his unit is moving to a special training area, to the bookseller blackmailing his assistant into obtaining information from her soldier boyfriend, to the RAF officer, who leaves his briefcase, where a German agent can steal, and copy his photographs, the film then shows in graphic detail, what could happen, when the troops land. and the enemy are waiting. This story shows to war weary audience, how easy it is to talk out of turn, and put allied soldiers lives at risk.