In wartime, you have to pull out all the stops. The conventional wisdom has to be discarded in an effort to surprise the enemy and catch him napping. You have to be able to think outside the box and come up with that one-two punch they’ll never see coming. In World War II, Hollywood eagerly joined up with America and her allies in an effort to whip a little Axis tail and they too wanted to launch their own assaults trumpeting freedom, courage, and sacrifice. Unfortunately, sometimes the audience suffered a little friendly fire, took one for the team, became some collateral damage. How else to explain the excruciatingly unsuccessful teaming of Joan Crawford and John Wayne in a movie about occupied France?
Crawford plays Michelle de la Becque (mainly by affecting a faint to non-existent accent) and if her character is supposed to represent all that is great about the French people than I have to wonder why we ever busted our hump to rescue them.
You see, she’s one of those fair-weather patriots that “rises” to the occasion only when the war is smacking her upside the head and her boyfriend has turned traitor. Before this, Nazis were sweeping over the rest of Europe and Michelle’s biggest concern was that she was going to have to start getting her silk imported in a diplomatic pouch or something.
The first part of the movie strenuously tries establish her character as a rich, thoughtless, self-centered jerk. This is done in all the usual ways – mainly by having her mistreat the hired help at the department store that supplies all her beautiful gowns. (Supposedly the gowns were the only positive experience for Crawford while making this film.)
Michelle has a fiancé named Robert Cortot who is an engineering genius and also really rich. He babbles all the time about how busy he is and ships Michelle off to Spain so that he can help win the war. When the Nazis capture France, Michelle slinks back home.
This is when the movie plays the war out in a bunch of spinning newspaper headlines and scenes of Michelle stumbling around with dirt on her face amid a bunch of scurvy refugees including a little kid with a missing foot! When she gets back home, Robert is busy with the war effort, but now it’s the Nazi war effort!
Oh, Robert! Say it isn’t so! Michelle, having been a war refugee for about a week, has changed and is now a superpatriot who can barely contain her contempt for the occupying Germans that Robert introduces her to.
He takes her to a really sweet cocktail party that he’s hosting and she is shocked, just shocked that it is a Nazi dinner party! The only question I have about these Nazi dinner parties is whether they really arranged their dining tables in the shape of a swastika?
With Michelle’s new found sense of French pride, she leaves her fiancé and goes back to her own mansion. She soon discovers that the horrors of war have struck her right where she lives! The Nazis have commandeered her home for some administrative offices and now she is allowed only one room in the entire mansion!
Duke Wayne finally appears about half way through the film as an RAF pilot who got shot down over France and is now on the run from the Krauts. He’s being trailed by some German agents (why don’t they just arrest him?) and he hasn’t eaten or slept in awhile when he runs into Michelle. After a little back and forth, she takes him into her place and gives him some food and a bed.
For some reason Duke starts hitting on Michelle (isn’t he supposed to be trying to escape back to Britain?), but she’s pulling a wholly unconvincing gimmick about how there’s no time for love in war. Duke gets in a little he-man action though when he decks the drunk and amorous Nazi that has taken over the rest of Michelle’s pad. Then she concocts a plan to get Robert (even though he’s a traitor) to help her and the Duke get out of France.
I never understood why she thought this plan would work or why she thought that Robert would want to help her after she punked him just because he went and looked out for number one. Then I didn’t understand why Robert actually did help her. But what really eluded me was why anyone would believe that Duke Wayne was not only a American college student, but a chauffeur as well!
The Nazis weren’t buying it either and tried to doublecross all involved, but since this is a propaganda movie, the doublecross was really on them!
A terrible, unbelievable story that makes little sense on any level and is topped off by the fact that you don’t believe anything the stars do in this movie (except for when Duke slugs that Nazi).
Duke and Crawford’s scenes could have been filmed on separate sets as little as the played off one another. They wanted us to think there was some love triangle, but Duke just would periodically grab and kiss her or say he loved her, while she would turn her nose up at him. All the while everyone (including Michelle) figured that Robert was a dirtbag conspirator. Suffice it to say, the love triangle bit flopped along with everything else in this hasty stew of war time posturing and clichés.
© 2010 MonsterHunter
