Sublime sacrifice

This is a fine film which essentially chronicles the early takeover of Germany by the Nazi Party. It tells the true story of a German pastor who stands up to the Nazi Machine. In many ways it tells the early story of the origins of resistance movements to totalitarian and evil regimes. It also is well acted and realistically portrayed. It unfortunately is extremely rare.

Wilfrid Lawson (Pastor Hall) plays real life German priest Martin Neimuller who was sent to a concentration camp for refusing to follow the Nazi script when it came to preaching from the pulpit. We follow his story as the Nazi party enforce their doctrine on a small German Village, with Marius Goring (Fritz) at the helm. This includes recruiting stormtroopers, bullying the Jewish race and the rape of a 14 year old girl. Can Lawson make a difference or does the regime get him…..?

This film holds the viewer's interest at it puts across the perspective from the German people living within the confines of Nationalist Socialism espoused by Hitler. It doesn't matter that all the accents are British, although Seymour Hicks did make me groan as we get a stereotypical blustery General character. Hang on, Hicks – he's meant to be German. And stop mumbling your lines! Anyway, he redeems himself at the end of the film with a moving humble performance at the village church.

Although the title role of Pastor Hall is played by Wilfrid Lawson, and he is undoubtedly the star of this film, he gets billing below both Nova Pilbeam and Sir Seymour Hicks, but above Marius Goring, in the credits. Unfair it may be, but everyone is so good in this film that it rather precludes any attempt to fight for star billing for a particular performer. Many years back, someone who knew about such things (it may have been Olivier) called Wilfrid Lawson the supreme British character actor of his time. It is almost impossible to look at him as the almost beatific Pastor Hall and quite believe that only one year earlier he had played (better than anyone else, ever) the highly disreputable father of Eliza Doolittle in the Leslie Howard-Wendy Hiller "Pygmalion" and a rather sinister fellow in "The Terror". While his turn in "Pygmalion" is probably his most famous film performance (and he was on screen from 1931 through his death in 1966), his Pastor Hall is probably the best thing he ever did on the screen. The other actors are his equal in all but the difficulty of the roles assigned to them. A grown up Nova Pilbeam, who is best remembered for her teenage performances in two Hitchcock films ("The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "Young and Innocent") gives what is surely her best performance in her somewhat aborted film career (seventeen films in nineteen years) as the pastor's very intelligent and brave daughter, and the venerable and quite legendary Sir Seymour Hicks as an old retired General is suitably huffy, puffy and good-humored throughout, but is incredibly moving in the tear-inducing final moment of his performance. Marius Goring, who was wonderful as cold-hearted villains, mentally unstable young men, good-hearted leading men and ineffectual weaklings (rather like a British Richard Basehart) is at his coldest here as the leader of a Storm Trooper brigade assigned to bring the town in which he is stationed into line with National Socialist policies. He is such a superb actor that, although he remains totally villainous throughout the film, we see the facade of his villainy wilt for a furtive moment when receiving a much-deserved tongue-lashing from Pastor Hall in front of the Pastor's fellow concentration camp inmates. Only great film actors can make a moment like that tell the way it does here. There is also a young Bernard Miles (later Lord Miles), very moving as a Storm Trooper guard at the concentration camp who had known Pastor Hall in better days. But there simply isn't a role in the film that isn't beautifully handled. Indeed, in its own way it is as perfectly cast as "Casablanca" was a few years later. And, if anyone has a problem with the British accents, at least everyone in the film has the same one, and no one ever complained about such things when Alexander Knox or John Carradine played villainous-but-unaccented Germans in American wartime films (and let us not forget that, in a total hodgepodge of accents in "Casablanca", Claude Rains, not eschewing his glorious British heritage for a moment, played to perfection the very French Captain Renault with the most wonderful British accent to be heard short of hiring John Gielgud for the part). Anyhow, if I have seen any film in the past year that is more unjustly forgotten than "Pastor Hall", I can't recall it; but even if the picture were less worthy than I think it is, it would still be worth viewing just for the wonderful actors doing some of their very best work in it.

"Pastor Hall" is a bold, very early attempt to expose the Nazi regime. Halliwell's Film Guide gives the film a measly one star rating, which only goes to prove one should not believe everything one reads in print. It is, as Halliwell says, a "courageous film of its time" but in direct opposition to Halliwell, it is VERY interesting dramatically. Cinematically, the film works and considering budget constraints, it is an admirable production for 1939 (released 1940). It is also a great example of British film making for the period.

It's greatest flaw is arguably the upper class English accents. An interesting thing happens once one is drawn into the film, however: because the accents are a constant, it becomes a dramatic convention that one accepts. In other words, it does not detract from the dramatic impact of the social statement that the film makes. It also lends the film a timeless quality to the moral values it underlines - making the film surprisingly relevant for the 21st century viewer.

Historically, it a very important film. Made before the full horrors of the concentration camps were known, "Pastor Hall" is the first film to deal with the issue of the Nazi concentration camps. Fortunatley, I have a copy that I taped off air several years ago, and the image quality is better than a lot of digital transfers I've seen.

This film should be revived. I'd run "Pastor Hall" as a main feature, and run Alain Resnais' stark 1955 documentary masterpiece, "Nuit Et Brouillard" (Night and Fog) right afterwards. Both films should be required viewing for the film student.

• If you found this 'mini-review' helpful, then please checkout my full length IMDb reviews, written for post-viewing discussion with live audiences. This postscript added 21st June 2006.

I know the term: based on a true story , and it does not say anything about the true nature of the story itself .

The real story is that Niemuller was at first an anthousiastic follower of adolf hitler and later on realized that the man was not what he pretended to be .

So niemuller became very critical and that resulted in an arrest and at first he was sent to sachsenhausen and later to dachau where he spent most of his time in the political prison building called the bunker ( cells for one person only ).

By my knowledge there was never an escape , that was nearly impossible .

This movie (minus some cruelty examples ) does not represent the life at the camp at all .

To make a movie about a prisoner at 1940 while he still is there for 5 years to come is beyond me and does not do his story any justice .