Unpublished Story

"Unpublished Story" is a very unique look into Britain during the war years. In many ways, it comes off a bit like a documentary--with events unfolding shortly after they happened for real. However, it is a drama--one based, in part, on real events and real Nazi-backed movements within Allied nations.

The film begins with a reporter, Bob Randall (Richard Greene) straggling in from the Dunkirk boat lift. He's dead tired but anxious to report what he saw--in particular, fifth columnists (i.e., Nazi agents posing as regular French citizens) who helped the Germans to topple France. However, to his surprise, he finds that folks in Britain STILL don't want to come to terms with this--and so-called 'peace' or 'appeasement' groups within the UK STILL are pushing for a peaceful settlement to the Nazis--even though the war was raging. But Bob is relentless and with the help of a new lady reporter (Valerie Hobson), they doggedly follow these groups and dig deeper. Not surprisingly, they find very bad people behind all of this.

This is a very fascinating view of the war--through the eyes of the Brits and discussing a lot of things you rarely see through normal documentary films--the fear, the Home Guard, hysteria and the Blitz. To help matters, the acting is amazingly good--very realistic and subdued. It also helped that the film avoided many of the clichés and overly jingoistic material that sometimes filled Hollywood's wartime dramas. My only real complaint, and it's a tiny one, is the lousy use of rear projection in the scene outside St. Paul's during the Blitz.

Unpublished Story is a propaganda piece with almost a documentary type setting in parts when it shows the effects of the Nazi bombings on Londoners.

Bob Randall (Richard Greene) and Carole Bennett (Valerie Hobson) are journalists investigating a pacifist group called People For Peace. The group is in effect taken over by Nazi fifth columnists to spread misinformation that resistance is futile.

Basil Radford plays Lamb, the man from the ministry with the habit to spike any news story not in the national interest.

It is an intriguing look at the peace movement at the time and the government at the time would had been aware that some unsavoury types would attempt to hijack such groups.

The film is rather uneven, you see brutal effects of the bombings but this is mixed with humour which sits rather inappropriately. The story of the secret Nazi infiltrators is not well told and at times appears confusing with little action regarding the main plot.

An English journalist just back from Dunkirk writes a story blasting a London-based peace- in-our-time organization, but the story is killed by a government agency. Are there Nazi sympathizers or just cautious bureaucrats in the agency? Is the peace group led by innocent dupes or by ruthless Nazi agents? The reporter intends to find out.

The movie isn't A-list, but it's better than a programmer. It's a craftsman-like piece of work. In feature roles are two first-rate British character actors, Roland Culver (The Pallisers, Dead of Night, On Approval) and Miles Malleson (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit).

This is a superior early wartime 'message picture' containing a great deal of real footage of the London Blitz, not all of which I recognised. Richard Greene and Valerie Hobson play two journalists working for the newspaper, the London Gazette, and much of the film takes place in the newsroom. The film's plot largely concerns a British 'peace society' which has been heavily infiltrated by Nazi agents. Anyone who doubts that that is how things worked with the Nazis has only to read the two books INSIDE THE GESTAPO and INSIDE INFORMATION by the high-ranking Gestapo defector (who reported directly to Heydrich) Hansjuergen Koehler to get the true picture. That is precisely how the Gestapo used the 'peace societies', as fronts for espionage and subversion. The Soviet Union did the same thing. It is such a standard and obvious technique that it is a wonder that anyone is left who does not see it clearly, but there are always fools aplenty. This film's message is thus very direct, but also very correct. It is warning the British public not only about appeasers, which abounded in Britain (Neville Chamberlain being the most prominent!), but about the woolly-headed idealists pursuing 'peace', which simply cannot be done with people like the Nazis. (See Dame Flora Robson's amazing performance in GUNS AT BATASI, 1964, for perhaps the best portrayal of a 'peace junkie' out of her depth.) There are numerous old faithfuls in the supporting cast, Basil Radford as a good buy, Roland Culver as a bad guy, Andre Morrell as a Gestapo agent, Frederick Cooper as a 'peace junkie' who discovers he has been manipulated by the Nazis and who then is to be seen pouring more sweat from terror than if he had been under twenty arc lights, and plenty of other excellent character actors. The film is well directed by Harold French, one of the directors of the three excellent Somerset Maugham anthologies (QUARTET, TRIO, and ENCORE), and who lived to be 100 years old (1897-1997)! Strange to think the last feature film he directed was in 1955 (THE MAN WHO LOVED REDHEADS with Moira Shearer) and that he then lived another 42 years. I wonder what he was doing. The film is based on a story by its producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, famous for producing David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER (for which he was uncredited), Lean's GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Lean's RYAN'S DAUGHTER, Franco Zeffirelli's ROMEO AND JULIET, and many more. He died in 2003, just before turning 99. So between them, the producer and the director of this film lived for just under 200 years. What were they taking? Maybe if we all watch this film 100 times we will all live forever.

One of the films made by Two Cities Films in the 1940s and 1950s, this is a mostly, well-done story of newspaper reporters running into fifth-columnists within their midst in Britain during WW II. The editor of the paper and some other characters say some silly lines, but they can be overlooked. Richard Greene, Valerie Hobson, and Basil Radford star in this predictable spy thriller, showing the realities of bombed out London, although much of it is a background screen projection. The plot brings up the usual "Do we fight back or acquiesce?" wartime debate.

Hobson had played Elizabeth in Bride of Frankenstein with the master B. Karloff in 1935. Greene was Sir Henry Baskerville opposite Basil Rathbone prior to "Unpublished...", and would later play Robin Hood in the British TV series for several years. Two Cities Films was part by the Rank Organization, which made films for many years. The Rank Organization would later be turned into a casino operator, which is still operating as a public company in England. Another interesting tidbit is Hobson's marriage to producer/writer Anthoney Havelock-Allen; she appears to have met and married him in 1939, and made nine films together. Sadly, they divorced in 1952, and she only made a couple more films after that...