They Raid by Night

The picture is set during German invasion of Norway, the historical events are the following : The invasion began on April 9, 1940. The German Navy and Airforce led the operation . The Hitler plan relied on surprise to avoid interception by the British and to prevent Norwegian forces from mobilizing. The sudden appearance of naval task forces took Norwegian defenders by surprise and allowed airfields around Oslo , Tondheim and Stevenager to be captured by the German intact. German forces at Trondheim advanced and linked up with forces in Oslo. Norwegian forces in central and southern began to surrender. In northern Norway British and French troops fighting against Germans in Narvik. But the Allied decided to pull out of Norway , evacuating forces from Narvik. Norway's royal family and government fled to Britain. Then the British staff assigns a dangerous mission to Canadian officer Owen (Lyle Talbot) to Norway to prepare for a ride to be executed by Allied and especially by the British Royal Navy. His aim also includes freeing a General who is being prisoned by the Nazis at a concentration camp. He's accompanied by Lieutenant Eric(George Neise) and sergeant Harry ( Charles Rogers). In Norway contact a waif-blind man. But Inga (Jane Duprez ) a Norwegian gorgeous girl to whom Eric was once betrothed is now a collaborationist of Nazis and she betrays them.

This is average and low-budgeted movie full of stock-shots of explosions and documentary footage from ships and cruisers. The director is genuinely skillful in the hectically edited cutting room and smartness from pressure exerted by the minimum budget, using even photographs as backgrounds.The movie is starred by B-series actors as Lyle Talbot who terminated his career working for Edward Wood Jr in 'Plan 9 from outer space' and 'Glen and Glenda' ; Charles Rogers , a secondary actor and director of films for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. And Jane Duprez who had a successful beginning with 'Four feathers' and 'Thief of Bagdag' but finished doing smallest pictures, here she plays a collaborationist or ¨Quisling¨ who was a Norwegian prime minister whose collaboration with the Nazis meant his name became a term meaning traitor.The film is regularly directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet. Spencer Gordon along with George B Seitz were the fathers of the American serial. Bennet' first was a stunt-men in the Seitz's serials. Later on, he struck out on the serial world and went on making serial until 1956, the last year of serial production by American Company. Bennet co-directed exciting serials as ¨Zorro, Superman, Captain Video, Bat man and Robin, Brick Bradford¨ and several others. Bennet's reputation for getting surprising reactions from his actors at the appropriate time was partly explained by his habit of creeping up behind his players and firing blanks. His Westerns with Tim McCoy, Will Bill Elliott, Buck Jones and Ken Maynard are all imaginative, fast- movement and with rattling scenes. Right at the end of his career he directed Sci-Fi as ¨submarine Seahawk¨ and ¨Atomic Submarine¨and again Westerns as ¨The bounty killer'and ¨Requiem for a gunfighter¨.

Granted "They Raid By Night" is not one of the best films of 1942, but it certainly is not the worst. Lyle Talbot and Charley Rogers turn in good performances unlike the rest of the cast. Talbot who had been in many "A" pictures for Warner Brothers/First National in the 1930s was now appearing in "B" pictures in the 1940s through no fault of his own. He was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild and the studios frowned on that and punished him, making it difficult for him to find work with the majors. One reviewer states the "film stars a man well acquainted with B-movies, Lyle Talbot" as though it was due to his lack of talent, which is not the case. The reviewer goes on to write that the film " not especially watchable-especially when there are so many better films like it already. This is clearly NOT another "Heroes of Tellemark"! Dumb and unconvincing." Unfortunately, he incorrectly spelled the title of the film he is citing. It is "Telemark" and Rotten Tomatoes gave the "Heroes of Telemark" a 67% rating and an average rating of 6.10/10, which is makes it fairly average.

Lyle Talbot leads a commando mission to occupied Norway to get a Norwegian general out of a POW camp. Opposing him is Victor Varconi as the local German Kommandant.

This PRC production has all the hallmarks of people trying to save money, including using drawn postcards as setting shots. The commando group is the most incompetent bunch of such I have ever seen. They are spotted within a couple of minutes, rescued by a blind man, and eventually leave him to stand guard with a gun over their prisoners.

The director is Spencer Gordon Bennett, who spent a good deal of the sound era directing serials. I am not expert on those, but of his features, I have yet to see one worth watching. Despite this, he continued to direct into the 1960s. I suppose he was cheap.

In the landscape of wartime cinema produced during the early 1940s, the movie is a curious artifact-positioned somewhere between earnest wartime morale-booster and creaky, low-budget espionage adventure. A product of PRC's relentless drive to churn out quick-turnaround features, the film offers a strangely compelling, if flawed, lens into the narrative possibilities of World War II microhistory, particularly as it concerns Allied covert operations in occupied Norway. What the film lacks in finesse and resources, it attempts to compensate with unrefined narrative ambition and occasional flashes of stylistic experimentation, albeit often undermined by production limitations that were plainly visible even by the standards of its contemporaries.

Technically, the movie is emblematic of its studio origins. PRC was never known for lavish budgets or marquee talent, and it shows. The visual world of occupied Norway is often constructed with static backdrops-sometimes obviously enlarged photographs or rudimentary painted curtains-and these choices create a persistent visual dissonance. Snowbound exteriors are evoked through rear projection, and action scenes rely heavily on stock footage, documentary inserts, and mismatched inserts of naval or air assaults that are not integrated with any narrative cohesion. At best, this patchwork approach can feel like a formal experiment in war montage; at worst, it pulls the viewer entirely out of the narrative, replacing immersion with inadvertent comedy.

Yet within these constraints, there is a strange inventiveness, especially in the editing. The film's director, a veteran of action serials, applies the rhythm of those chapter-plays to sequences that might otherwise drag. One can sense the hand of a filmmaker trained to sustain momentum despite a lack of coverage or money, often stitching together excitement in the cutting room with a kind of workmanlike tenacity. The use of documentary footage-while frequently jarring in its inconsistency-nonetheless imparts a raw, pseudo-authentic atmosphere that briefly lends weight to the proceedings. This technique, reminiscent of Target for Tonight or the early parts of Desert Victory, is more utilitarian than aesthetic, but it succeeds sporadically in grounding the otherwise artificial mise-en-scène in the reality of wartime Europe.

Performance-wise, the cast is largely assembled from B-tier journeymen, delivering serviceable but rarely inspired work. The lead displays a stiff, square-jawed presence, suggesting authority without fully commanding it, while the supporting players oscillate between archetype and parody. The German antagonists, in particular, are written with a degree of cartoonish buffoonery that undermines any serious tension; their incompetence becomes a narrative crutch, allowing the protagonists to succeed without credible peril. This tonal misstep distances the film from more accomplished contemporaries like Edge of Darkness (1943), which treated resistance narratives in Norway with greater emotional complexity and a far more textured sense of the enemy's menace.

Yet the film is not without its dramatic strengths. A standout sequence involving a lie detector interrogation manages to convey a surprising level of suspense and psychological nuance, using a cigarette burn as a means to manipulate the machine's readings-an idea both original and sharply executed. Moments like this reveal that behind the formulaic structure and economic desperation, there was a willingness to explore inventive character beats. Similarly, the portrayal of a civilian collaborator character-distinctly unsentimental and grounded in bitter pragmatism-adds a layer of moral ambiguity rarely seen in American wartime propaganda of the era. Her betrayal, explained not through villainy but through survival and resentment, complicates the film's otherwise binary worldview and aligns it more with the introspective wartime portraits found in films like Commandos Strike at Dawn or The Silent Enemy.

Unfortunately, these intriguing moments are scattered amidst a sea of inconsistencies and unintentional comedy. Dialogue frequently falls into stiff exposition or overwrought declarations. Physical staging is often cramped and awkward, constrained by cramped sets that require actors to navigate through hanging curtains doubling as walls or to march stoically past the same rock multiple times in different lighting. Suspense sequences, such as the infiltration of the prison camp or the ambush in the forest, are undermined by predictable blocking and staging so rudimentary it feels more akin to stage melodrama than cinema.

Still, there is a kind of charm in the movie's directness-an unpretentiousness that reflects the urgency and purpose of its production context. It is wartime cinema not as art, but as a hastily assembled call to morale, a fragment of filmic propaganda aimed less at enduring legacy than immediate psychological utility. For scholars of wartime cinema or aficionados of World War II microhistories rendered on screen, its value lies more in what it attempts than what it achieves.

Where films like The Heroes of Telemark or Above Us the Waves present Norwegian operations with robust production values and considered pacing, the movie offers instead a raw, rushed snapshot of wartime storytelling in extremis-a small, jagged relic from the propaganda trenches of 1942. It's not refined, and certainly not great cinema, but in its roughness lies a strange kind of authenticity: a reminder that not all wartime stories are told with polish, but some still manage to resonate-however faintly-with echoes of truth.

I should have seen this ambush coming, from the very first office/room whose walls were constructed out of curtains. This movie, amongst others, was required pre-school for mega-talents to come, eg Edward D Wood Jr. Actors walking past painted backdrops, actors arriving through one curtain, and leaving by another, characters finding it difficult to get in & out of cars, none of this is an element of making fine films. It is however, common place for a movie made on a budget shorter than a shoe-string. A movie only for those who collect quantity, rather than quality.