Directed by Jean Renoir
My rating: 3 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Turner Classic Movies)
Timid school teacher Charles Laughton gets caught up in the resistance movement of an occupied city of Europe during WWII. He's secretly in love with fellow teacher Maureen O'Hara, whose brother is a saboteur desperately wanted by the Germans. Her fiance George Sanders is a Nazi sympathizer which causes her to break up with him. She accuses Laughton of turning in her brother but in his sensational trial the truth is revealed. Laughton gives a series of speeches in the denouement: in the first he poignantly admits to being a coward on the outside but realizes that bravery lives in his heart, in the second he makes a case to the townspeople for supporting saboteurs and in the final one he recites the American Bill of Rights to his young students before being lead away, presumably to be executed. Released in 1943 at the height of the war, the speeches become increasingly propagandist, but Laughton is utterly convincing in a bravura performance.
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