Thursday, February 23, 2012

The Red Danube (1949)


Academy Awards, USA
YearResultAwardCategory/Recipient(s)
1951 Nominated Oscar Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White
Cedric Gibbons
Hans Peters
Edwin B. Willis
Hugh Hunt

MGM
Directed by George Sidney
My rating: 3 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Warner Archive Collection)
(Turner Classic Movies)

The Danube in Austria runs red not from blood but from Russian communists. Walter Pidgeon and Peter Lawford are British officers assigned to Vienna for the purpose of cooperating with their Russian "allies" in the months after WWII. Their main duty is to round up "subversives" to be handed over to the Russians for repatriation. When one of them turns out to be the latest romantic conquest of Lawford, it gets personal. Ethel Barrymore is a nun who debates ethics and religion with Pidgeon. Janet Leigh is the pretty ballerina at the center of it all. One particularly memorable scene is a walk through a boxcar full of refugees on Christmas Eve, when Pidgeon realizes what the Russians are really doing to the people he turns over to them.

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