Candlelight in Algeria

This is all adventure while the war is only a decoration. Lovely Carla Lehmann, reminding very much of Carole Lombard, is a very American Kansas girl who accidentally gets mixed up with a brazen English adventurer (James Mason) who has taken some forbidden pictures of some very secret German maps, which he is being chased for as he tries to smuggle them out of Algeria. They team up and eventually end up in the exotic Casbah, where anyone can hide or disappear forever. There is a lot of good humour here, the dialog is flippant and exhilarating, the wit is constantly on a high level and good mood, and Carla is doing surprisingly well. The Germans are not all complete dumbbells here, doktor Muller is quite awesome in his perfect politeness, and the exploration of intriguing environments in Algiers is quite entertaining, and eventually the invasion of North Africa starts rolling on. The spirit of the film is ironic with some detachment, and there are some really hilarious scenes with French and German officers in their very different approach to women. It is not a great film, but it is entertaining enough.

Candlelight in Algeria from 1944 is a British film about the invasion of North Africa by the Allies. It stars a skinny, mustached James Mason and Carla Lehmann.

Lehmann plays Susan, an American from Kansas who meets Alan (Mason) on the run from the Germans, when he breaks into her house. He asks her to steal a camera which has film showing the meeting place of the Allies to plan the invasion.

When the Germans arrest her, Alan rescues her, but the Germans are in pursuit.

Very good and atmospheric film, with Lehman resembling Meryl Streep in some angles. Mason had a remarkable career in British films before hitting a big over here; in this film, he is a scrappy freedom fighter.

I rated this film 6/10 having discovered it in a rare film emporium in Camden Market, North London, last Sunday.I am a forties film aficionado but had never seen this title before.One thing British/American films constantly do in war films is to assume all German/French characters speak fluent English (to make it easy on audiences who will mostly only speak this language), and this film was no exception, (although marginally less so than most US 40s films of the time).What is especially laughable is when German characters speak in English to other German characters!On the other hand, this 1944 film did not take itself too seriously especially the end scene, when Carla Lehmann describes to James Mason how Hollywood would have filmed the self same scene, (all done to keep up the nation's morale!).A more enlightened treatment of showing various European languages on film is for producers to hire actors German/French who can speak in their own native tongue but then show English sub-titles for that part of the plot as in Darryl F Zanuck's ground breaking epic, "The Longest Day" (1962).

The two US reviewers above seemed to have enjoyed this film, so I suppose it served its purpose however I could not award it more than just above an adequate rating.

I noticed a discrepancy with the running time of the version of this film I downloaded for free at archive.org--it runs 81 minutes, not 86. IMDb says there's a severely truncated version at 65 minutes...but this one I saw was missing only five minutes or the running time listed on IMDb is incorrect.

When the film begins, Susan (Carla Lehmann) awakens in a hospital bed as there are celebrations for the combined Allied landing in North Africa. The film then jumps back to before this and explains what exactly had happened to Susan.

A desperate escaped POW takes shelter in Susan's home in Algeria. At this point, the Vichy French and Americans were not at war with each other and so despite the Vichy being essentially a vassal state to the Nazis, American nationals are allowed in this part of France even though the US and Germany are at war. So, if Susan wanted to, she simply could have turned in Alan (James Mason) and been safe. But instead he soon convinces her to help him obtain a camera filled with important film...film which COULD hamper the Americans and Free French from invading North Africa. And, as a result of her choice, Susan is in almost constant peril.

This is a pretty exciting war film--one obviously meant to drum up sentiment in favor of the Allied cause. While technically this is a propaganda film, it's a good one and doesn't come off as jingoistic or which depicts the Germans as monsters like many other films. Because of this, it holds up pretty well, though most viewers today might not understand the context for the film--such as what was Vichy France and how were the Free French very different. Still, an enjoyable little film. Oh, and although it doesn't matter, the American lady, Susan, was played by a Canadian. And, there also is a bit of a plot hole as the film really did NOT explain why Susan was in the hospital--particularly as just before this she seemed healthy and just fine on the ship. Odd...as was the ending, though that was odd in an enjoyable sense.

Carla Lehmann wakes in a hospital in North Africa, where she tells a nursing sister of how she met British spy James Mason, stole a camera in Algiers for him and outwitted various nasty Nazis to save the landings at Oran in North Africa.

It's a good, breezy movie directed by George King, who just half a decade earlier had been directed melodramas starring Tod Browning. Now he was telling James Mason, one of Britain's biggest home-grown stars of the period what to do. Mason, however, is not the subject of the movie, and is present for about half of it. Instead, Canadian-born Miss Lehmann carries the show as a quick-witted sculptress from Kansas. She's pretty good, even though the net effect of this movie is a hands-across-the-seas programmer from, say, Universal. The plot borrows liberally from other movies. There's an extensive Casbah segment that suggests PEPE LE MOKO, and a local girl hopelessly in love with Mason, played charmingly by Pamela Stirling; Walter Rilla plays the baddie, even though there isn't much menace in performance; and the Americans are represented, not only by Miss Lehmann, but Bart Norman playing General Mark Clark!

Mason didn't think much of the movie. He later noted that after the war, it was a hit in Bulgaria. Perhaps it's because he wore a mustache for the first half of it.