Reviews

I stumbled onto this beauty on TCM a few weeks ago, and could not believe it. It is the closest thing I have seen to a prototype for the much-maligned Hogan's Heroes television program. We have a multinational Alied group in Germany doing as much damage as they can to the Axis war effort, with laughs all along the way wherever they can be found. It even has received some of the same criticism that Hogan's Heroes received.

There are some substantial differences: Sargent Schultz is on the Allied side; I am not sure if he, played by Alan Hale, is supposed to be American or English. There is a sort of Sargent Schultz for the Germans, in Sig Ruman (who I believe also played Schultz in Stalag 17), but he is a little tougher and a little smarter than Schultz. Colonel Klink in this picture, played by Raymond Massey, is a thoroughly bad baddie, sort of a Major Hochstedder with a monocle and a promotion. The biggest difference is that the boys are on the road, not stationed in a prison camp. But then, to turn it into a long running TV show, putting them into a prison camp makes perfect sense.

Most reviewers think this movie is totally silly with unrealistically stupid and incompetent Germans and too many hair's breadth escapes by the boys. I do not agree, as the Axis German establishment showed themselves to be not the supermen they were billed to be. After all, with an incompetent lunatic leader and incompetent lazy assistant leader in Hitler and Goering, and a German military and Gestapo drilled to blind obedience, it should not be surprising that people brought up in an environment that values independent thinking are able to outwit them time and again. And in spite of that, only three of the bomber crew survived to get out of Germany - the majority of the crew perished, mostly on-screen. Two things that did not ring true did capture my attention: 1) I don't think the railway junction that was the target existed, or if it did it was not where they said it was; and it appeared that the mission failed to hit it anyway. 2)I am not familiar with the Lockheed 2-engine bomber that was supposedly used, but I doubt that it could have made the round trip that would have been necessary to reach the target and return.

A couple other notes: Regarding the "Japs" comment. It may or may not have been racist, but the Japanese military government of the time earned a reputation for evil, and deserved no polite consideration. Their treatment of Chinese civilians and American and British prisoners of war is sufficient evidence (see "Rape of Nanking" and various documentaries on the Bataan Death March). Even today, it is my belief that the Japanese have never officially apologized or made any atonement for what they did. This is in sharp contrast to the Germans, who I believe murdered fewer innocent non-combatants than did the Japanese (or Joseph Stalin throughout his career for that matter).

I am being generous giving this thing a "5" but the desert scenes were interesting and I liked the decoder gizmo. The first 10 minutes of this thing were the most ludicrous I have ever seen. After gaping in disbelief I started laughing, then decided to continue watching and see what else they would do, how bad it could get. Eventually I decided that maybe Mira Sorvino's character could have ridden a horse, carrying a golden staff, and "jousted" a 250 lb man in armor off his horse. Mira is a big girl, about 5'10" tall, not skinny, and she looked all through this thing like she never wore makeup and couldn't care less how she looked - she looked terrible, actually. Ther are clues later on that she has had martial arts training, and she pulls quite a few other stunts that suggest one would not want to meet her in a dark alley. So much for the joke.

The crime: the people in this thing do all kinds of things that they shouldn't do, giving archaeology a bad name. I will mention only one. No archaeologist would ever open a flask that had been sealed for 700 years, pull out the scroll she knows is in it, and unroll it, all while sitting on the beach just after finding the flask in a place where she has good reason to believe it had been hidden for 700 years. She could have done irreparable damage to it; it could have crumbled in her fingers. OK, one more. Uncover a buried city, that has not seen the light of day for who knows how long? jump into an underground chamber in it and start crawling around, with your only partner? No way. They could have both been overcome by fumes immediately, and suffocated due to lack of oxygen.

A few more questionable things - the Templars were destroyed by the king of France because he wanted their wealth. Simple as that. He spread all kinds of propaganda about them, justifying his actions, but it was mostly BS. The Church only went along with him, mostly because the pope at the time was a stooge of the French king.

I enjoyed this movie because I like courtroom films. I also enjoy war movies, and for that matter, almost every kind of movie, except musicals, generally, and absurd fantasy types. Having said this, I want to make the point that the motion picture industry cannot do anything true to life. The need to produce drama is the worst spoiler of all, because the best writers can't seem to come up with believable incidents of the type that would happen in real life. Real life is full of coincidences and unbelievable situations, that seem perfectly acceptable when they happen, but these things cannot be put into a work of fiction without seeming forced. There, I got that off my chest.

This movie was exceptional because I finally saw Tyrone Power in a sympathetic role, where I actually did not dislike him. I do not consider this odd, because other commentators have agreed with me that they do not see his attraction. As I have said in comments on other of his films, I have heard from reliable sources that he was very hot stuff in the 1940's, but I cannot see why. Maybe women found him attractive, but I would say there were better looking leading men then.

Following is the spoiler: About 2/3 of the way through the movie a new character showed up. I said to myself, "who is this character really?" Is this the sister of the Marlene Deitrich character in disguise?" more likely, "Is this the brother of the Marlene Deitrich character in drag?". Obviously, at least to me, if not to Robert Osborne of TCM and most other people, this character was being played by Marlene Deitrich in very heavy makeup. "Why?", I kept asking myself, to the point of distracting me from the rest of the movie, until the secret was revealed. I don't want to sound like Sherlock Holmes, but all the details of the disguise were too obvious. It was like she was supposed to be spotted. But she wasn't! Luckily for me, they have this film at my local library so I can watch it a few more times to see who screwed up. The whole big deal they made about not revealing the ending to people who had not seen the movie seemed to me to be totally ridiculous.

Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton, and most of the supporting cast did their jobs very well, so it won't be a chore to see it again. Elsa's little thing at the end made it almost seem like truth, not fiction.

Many reviewers on this site, and the daytime host of Turner Classic Movies have said, this is the only Hollywood movie that has been made about the Lewis and Clark expedition. They have all been misinformed. This film is so lacking in historical accuracy that I am surprised the heirs of Lewis and Clark (perhaps there aren't any) have not sued the producers for slander. Nothing except the heroism of Sacajawea and the general route of the expedition are portrayed even remotely realistically. Many reviewers have pointed out errors; I will just add a few more: No one in Washington knew there were mountains between the source of the Missouri River and rivers flowing to the Pacific (Jefferson thought an all water route could be developed), the only serious Indian difficulties were met with the Blackfeet, Birchbark canoes were strictly a Chippewa product and western tribes mostly used the much more rugged dugout canoes as they had a ready supply of very large tree trunks for raw material (Idaho, between the Missouri and Columbia Rivers is still a lumber supplying country today), very few Americans knew what a buffalo was in 1806, Judith, not Julia, had her name immortalized in Montana natural features, the explorers were sending back to Jefferson reports and specimens along the way as they proceeded west but it took some time to get a finished narrative to him and some of the crewmen got their reports published before Clark's (Lewis never did finish his). And of course, most notably, Sacajawea was firmly in the familial arms of her French fur trader husband (who was a skunk) for all or most of the trip, even having a son by him on the trail; and it was very unlikely that William Clark had any romantic interest in her. She was a teen ager at the time, and I thought the 34 year old Donna Reed did a good job of playing a teen aged Indian girl, even if no one else did. Also, there actually was an incident when a boat (actually 2 boats) was pulled up around a portage on rollers on track. So we are still waiting for the movie, but there has been some non-fiction work done that is pretty good, entertaining and worth watching.

I have seen this film several times, and watched it today (on TCM) solely because of Geraldine Fitzgerald. She is a much underrated actress and I have to admit I have had a crush on her since I first saw her (probably in "Wuthering Heights" 40 or more years ago). The real star in this movie, however, is Paul Lukas, and he deserved all the accolades he got. He makes it clear, whether we like it or not, that the end justifies the means. Naziism had to be stopped, and anything that helped do it was good. He gave his children a line about being bad, and that they should not be bad, but as he said earlier when conversing with adults, he would do this sort of thing again without hesitation. Lukas did give an excellent portrayal of a man caught in this situation, and made it clear that what he did was a very hard thing to do.

Some people think his victim was a Nazi, but I don't think so - I think he was only after the money. His Nazi associates knew this and that is why they did not have much use for him.

One interesting point in the film, and presumably also in the play, is the fact that Muller (Lucas) is a German. While the anti German hysteria of WWI was not repeated in WWII, there was considerable anti-German sentiment and some Germans were interred similar to what happened in California with people of Japanese ancestry. It was something of an act of bravery for Hellman to write a play about good Germans at this time (maybe she thought they were the ones who signed the Nazi-Soviet pact!). After all, the US and British air forces were bombing German cities and having no qualms about killing innocent civilians. I think, however, that the Dresden bombing and firestorm happened later, after "Watch on the Rhine" was released.

The title is something of a play on words, as the "watch" is looking west, from Germany. In fact, Watch am Rhein was a German army marching song - used in WWII, but the Nazis had their own marching song that was used as well. But Muller IS a German and he is engaged in his own "Wach am Rhein".

All the other actors did an excellent job here; although Bodo was too much there are children like him. I am surprised he did not give his father's secret away. In real life, he may very well have done so.

I had seen this film in a theatre a long time ago, during a Hichcock/Stewart retrospective in Philadelphia. I did not particularly like the film then but decided to watch it again at home and see why I did not like it. As many commentators have said, Hitchcock went through several periods, and I thought maybe this could be my problem - that I did not like his "1948" period. After all, there were not very many good movies made in 1948, by anybody. Perhaps they were all worried about what television would do to them. I don't think the "period" theory works here. Hitchcock made several movies where he seemed to be on a very tight budget, where he apparently tried to get away with producing it if it was a play and not a movie. I think this is one of them. The background sky scene out the window showed the progression of time all right, by the way the sun changed, but otherwise it looked too fake for me. I got the same impression with "The Trouble with Harry", "The Lady Vanishes", and a few others, more recent, so this issue seems not to be related to when in Hitchcock's career the films were made.

I can say I did not like some of the characters and actors, but not the same ones other people disliked. I thought Sir Cedric Hardwicke played his part excellently - a father confused about why his usually reliable son has not showed up for this party. If I had been stupid enough to do what Farley Granger's character did, I probably would have acted just as irrationally as that character did - so Granger did fine, in my opinion. Brandon, however, was a piece of work. I found him revolting, even without his murder plot. He is one of those people who think they are so superior, but aren't, but want to keep proving to people how superior they (think they) are. This was played to perfection by John Dall - too perfectly. Brandon's stuttering was a dead giveaway that he was guilty of something, and anyone casually acquainted with him should have figured it out - not just super sleuth as played by James Stewart. Another character who did not fit was the aunt - did not seem like she was her brother's sister at all. Constance Collier (I think that is her name) is so irritating she should only play villains - she was miscast here and just took away from the story by being irritating.

Finally, big disappointment - not a McGuffin Movie. There was a love interest, but the plot drove it rather than the other way around. Joan Chandler's character could have skipped the party and it would not have made much difference. Brandon could have found something else to be obnoxious about. What her presence does do, in my opinion, is prove one thing - this is not a film about homosexuals. All the boys seemed to be interested in her, including Brandon (at least he apparently was once, judging by one or two lines). Although the reasons for her breakups with both Brandon and David (both mentioned very briefly in on-screen conversations) could have been because she found out they were gay, it seems to me not to be the case, but I am only going by her behavior. I don't think all the surface evidence of homosexuality is valid, because things were different in those days. Two guys living together, even with one dominating the other, and all the other clues, could be more or less innocent. But my friends say I can be terribly naive!

This is a fascinating movie, and I agree with an 8/10 rating, but there are a few things that bother me: 1) It is not clear whether the Senate ratified the treaty or not. If they did, Gen Scott has no business blaming it on the President alone, and he is obviously more interested in his own future than the country's. If they did not ratify it (yet) he should be working on that angle, with his henchman from California, and shouldn't have any trouble getting the treaty rejected by the Senate if it is as unpopular and impractical as they say it is. 2) Nobody mentioned impeachment. If the prez somehow snuck the treaty past the Senate (see #1), and it is as bad as Scott says, then impeachment seems a good possibility. 3) Verification: someone mentioned it, but it was then dropped. It sounds like we could have backed out as soon as we decided that the USSR was not holding up their end of the bargain. Did Scott think that would be too late? 4) As I understand it, we had overwhelming superiority over the Soviets in nuclear armament at this time, and Fletcher Knebel should have known about it.