Anti-fascist films

[nightwalker]

Lots of good films listed here, and some good comments as well.

One I haven't seen mentioned yet is the 1944 Errol Flynn starrer UNCERTAIN GLORY, co-starring Paul Lukas.

Flynn plays a French (!) criminal sentenced to death by guillotine who manages to escape from his cell just before his execution when the prison is bombed in an Allied air raid. Paul Lukas is the police inspector who captured him and who is once again on his trail.

Lukas catches up with Flynn in a small town where he has gone to hide out, but Flynn, in an attempt to stall for time until he can escape, offers to surrender himself to the Nazis who are seeking an underground agent who sabotaged a train. All Flynn says he wants is the time remaining before the Nazis' deadline expires, but what he really wants is to escape at the first opportunity.

What happens during that time makes up the heart of the film.

Although he meets and falls in love with a young girl in the town, whose freshness and innocence charms him, Flynn also comes across people from his past who know him and would be interested in handing him over in order to claim the reward on his head.

Then, too, there's the townsfolk, most of whom apart from the village priest (Dennis Hoey in a standout dramatic turn) want to turn him in to the Nazis in order to save the real saboteur, not knowing that that's (allegedly) his plan in the first place!

The film thus becomes a study in human nature: conflict, doubt, greed, selfishness, selflessness, you name it, with the question becoming "Will Flynn live long enough to do anything of his own volition, whatever it might be?" Flynn's ultimate decision, and the factors leading up to it, make this one of the most compelling of the "anti-fascist" films of the period.

I think it compares favorably with THE SEVENTH CROSS, with which it has much in common.