 |
| Frank Tuttle: Hostages (1943). |
 |
| Frank Tuttle: Hostages (1943). Arturo de Córdova (Paul Breda), Luise Rainer (Milada Pressinger), Paul Lukas (Richard Rheinhardt). |
US 1943. Director: Frank Tuttle.
Sog.: from the eponymous novel (1942) by Stefan Heym. Scen.: Lester Cole, Frank Butler. F.: Victor Milner. M.: Archie Marshek. Scgf.: Franz Bachelin, Hans Dreier. Mus.: Victor Young.
Int.: William Bendix (capo della resistenza), Luise Rainer (Milada Pressinger), Arturo de Córdova (Paul Breda), Paul Lukas (Richard Rheinhardt), Katina Paxinou (Maria), Oskar Homolka (Pressinger), Reinhold Schünzel (Kurt Daluege), Frederick Giermann (capitano Patzer).
Prod.: Sol C. Siegel per Paramount Pictures 35 mm. 88 min
Theme tune: Antonín Dvořák: Slovanské tance, II. řada, Op. 72, Nr. 2, mazurka, e-moll, allegretto grazioso.
Unreleased in Finland.
Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato: Guns for Hire: Frank Tuttle vs. Stuart Heisler
2020 print from NBC Universal by concession of Park Circus
E-subtitles in Italian by Sub-Ti Londra.
Viewed at Cinema Jolly, 29 Aug 2020.
Ehsan Khoshbakht (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020): "One of the most sobering wartime films made in Hollywood about the atrocities in Europe, this is also one of Tuttle’s greatest. Written by Lester Cole, soon to be blacklisted, the film’s historical perspective and visionary nature matches that of Cole’s other great achievement from the following year, None Shall Escape (shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2018). William Bendix, in one of his finest screen roles, plays a restaurant waiter in 1943 Prague; considered an idiot, he is in fact a resistance leader. His workplace is frequented by Nazi officers and when a homesick officer kills himself, the Gestapo calls it a murder and vows retaliation. Random citizens are picked for execution, including the resistance leader and a collaborator. While the initial death is considered a murder, the film ends with a Nazi passing off the murder of another officer as suicide. Nazi occupation is seen as a continuously futile and suicidal act. This is not a propaganda film by any stretch, but rather a film about propaganda. William Randolph Hearst’s “Los Angeles Herald Express” disagreed and cried Red: “plain Communism masquerading under the guise of Czech patriotism”. Cole must have worn this as a badge of honour. The location footage was originally shot some six years earlier for Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife by Ernst Lubitsch who, in 1942, had made his own Nazi occupation film, To Be or Not to Be. Paul Lukas, fresh from Watch on the Rhine, plays Rheinhardt, a role originally meant for Erich von Stroheim (who instead appeared in Five Graves to Cairo). It was a time of urgent creativity in the production of war films focusing on the moral complexities of war. Tuttle shows fascism as unprincipled and unfaithful to humanity or truth, he keeps the tone pensive and eerily quiet, the air charged with oppression. Between silence (a female prisoner silently crying) and whispering (the way the Czechs talk) there’s the deafening sound of a machine gun. But even under fire, the Czechs in the film fall without a sound." Ehsan Khoshbakht (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020)
AA: This Hollywood film from Paramount Pictures is from a European viewpoint also ein Exilfilm, employing a lot of German and European exile talent to a resistance thriller about the Nazi occupation of Prague.
Hostages is based on Stefan Heym's bestselling debut novel, which he wrote in exile in English. Heym was not involved in the making of the film: he had become an US citizen and started his service in the US Army in January 1943.
Later in life Heym stated that his novel covered "just a bit of the truth" about the occupation, and the film even less, but he was nevertheless always proud of both, because they were manifestoes of another Germany, fighting for freedom and against Nazism. Retrospectively, Heym found the account of the Nazis romanticized. There was also much more collaboration than Heym knew at the time.
I have not read Heym's 362-page novel, but much of its complex plot is apparently included in the movie's compact screenplay. The action is thrilling, and there are several plot turns that demand attention. The retaliation plot is brutal, but most emphatically, Hostages is a game of wits.
Key protagonists play double roles. Janoshik (William Bendix), a dim-witted waitroom attendant, is in reality Karel Vokosch, the leader of the Resistance. Paul Breda (Arturo de Córdova), a media liaison, translator and censor of the Nazis, is a Resistance contact.
The cast is exciting. Luise Rainer (1910–2014) had withdrawn from her MGM contract in 1938 to focus on theatre work and other activities such as helping Spanish Civil War orphans, but she returned for this final major Hollywood role.
The Hungarian theatre veteran Paul Lukas won an Academy Award in the same year for his male lead in another Resistance drama, Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine.
The Mexican star Arturo de Córdova (Soledad's Shawl, Luis Buñuel's Él) worked in Hollywood at the time, and he is a suave and convincing presence as the double agent Paul Breda.
Another Resistance leader is played by the Greek star Katina Paxinou (Rocco and His Brothers), who also appeared in the same year in the Hemingway epic For Whom the Bells Toll.
There is a tinge of the caricature in the Nazi characters, largely played by German Jewish emigrants, and who can blame them? The ambience is "Prague, Paramount" which is a bit distancing, and maybe not stylized enough: Chaplin in The Great Dictator created an all-out fairy-tale atmosphere, and Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be was based on the concept "all the world is a stage". Frank Tuttle does not go so far, perhaps not far enough? The same reservation applies to Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die!, also made in 1943 about Gestapo in Prague.
An important plot point may be lost for today's viewers, and plot summaries fail to register it. The suicide of the SS officer Lt. Glasenapp (Hans Conried) that sets the whole plot in motion is based on his realization that his "bride is to be sent to the breeding colony".
This is a reference to the Lebensborn program of the Nazis where women were sent to breeding colonies – human henhouses and stud farms – to mass produce babies for SS families to speed up the rise of the Master Race.
A brilliant print of an important film about the resistance spirit.
At a small wharfside restaurant in Nazi-occupied Prague, the washroom attendant, Janoshik, receives a message hidden inside his sandwich.
When a drunken Nazi lieutenant named Glasenapp then goes to the washroom, Janoshik attends him, unaware that the lovesick [AA: this is a gross misinterpretation] German is going to commit suicide. After Janoshik is summoned upstairs to tend the bar, Glasenapp's friends suddenly realize that he has disappeared. Glasenapp's body is found and the Czech restaurant staff and patrons are all arrested for his murder.
When patron Otto Preissinger, a Nazi collaborator and the powerful director of the Bohemian / Moravian Coal Syndicate, protests that a man in his position should not be included among the prisoners, Sergeant Schuler treats him roughly and shoves him back in line. Fortunately for Preissinger, his daughter Milada and her fiancé, Jan Pavel, left the restaurant before the incident.
Gestapo Commissioner Richard Rheinhardt is appalled when the coroner determines that Glasenapp was not murdered, but committed suicide, as Preissinger is a friend of Hermann Göring. However, Protektor Kurt Daluege, the highest German authority in Prague, turns the situation to their advantage by making a secret agreement with Rheinhardt to change the coroner's finding to murder, and kill the prisoners so that they can take control of Preissinger's valuable operation.
The cellmates become alarmed when Schuler brings them a newspaper report which announces that they will be executed in seventy-two hours unless the murderer is apprehended. When Rheinhardt refuses to see Milada and Jan, the publisher of Prague's major newspaper introduces them to Paul Breda, a Czech hired by the Nazis as a translator and censor, but Paul agrees to help them only after Milada promises to pay him handsomely.
Rheinhardt is deaf to Milada's pleas, however, and secretly has her followed by agent Mueller. Unknown to the Gestapo, Paul is a member of the Czech underground, and Janoshik, whose real name is Karel Vokosch, is its current leader.
As Janoshik is the only person in communication with the local longshoremen, his arrest has delayed the planned bombing of the Nazi munitions depot at the wharf. In order to free him, Janoshik's comrade Marie concludes that another underground member must give himself up for the murder so the hostages will be released. One man, Joseph, volunteers, but is killed by Nazis before he can turn himself in, so Paul takes his place.
That night, Paul informs Milada and Jan that her father will be saved, and despite Jan's distrust, Milada agrees to meet him with the money in the restaurant. Paul and Milada are grabbed by Mueller, but the restaurant is filled with underground members, and Paul kills Mueller when Marie turns out the lights.
Later that night, Milada joins the underground but is devastated to learn that Paul is giving his life for her father. In prison, meanwhile, Janoshik suddenly realizes that Glasenapp must have committed suicide, as he had left the man alone in the washroom, and that the Nazis are getting rid of them because of Preissinger.
When Janoshik is overheard talking about Glasenapp's purported suicide letter, he is interrogated by Rheinhardt. Rheinhardt fails to see through Janoshik's pose as an ignorant country peasant, and has Schuler and his men take him to the restaurant to find the letter, which Janoshik claims he did not mail because of his arrest. Schuler brutally beats Janoshik, who goes into the washroom to be sick, and escapes out the window into the ocean.
With Janoshik free, Paul does not turn himself in, and Jan believes that he has cheated Milada. However, Rheinhardt is shocked when he learns that Karol Vokosch slipped through his grasp, and unsuccessfully attempts to use Preissinger to manipulate Milada into revealing Paul's hiding place.
On Janoshik's instructions, the underground distributes leaflets to the public informing them of Glasenapp's suicide and the fact that the prisoners will be executed so the Nazis can control Preissinger's fortune.
Paul and Milada go to see Rheinhardt, who forestalls his plan to torture Paul so they can witness the executions of the prisoners. At that moment, innocent-looking fishermen, under the leadership of Janoshik, bomb the munitions depot. When he hears the explosion, Rheinhardt orders the soldiers to use machine guns on the prisoners. Paul and Milada are asked to leave the room when the Protektor comes in, after which Daluege reprimands Rheinhardt for bungling the entire episode.
As no one else knows of their secret plan to take over Preissinger's company, Daluege shoots Rheinhardt and makes his death look like a suicide, then promotes Schuler. As he leaves the building, Daluege inquires about Paul and Milada's presence.
Paul, thinking quickly, tells him that Rheinhardt wanted him to witness the executions for the newspaper, and Daluege instructs him to report that Rheinhardt has left Prague for a "well-deserved rest in the Fatherland." Stunned by their good fortune, Paul and Milada walk out of Gestapo headquarters.
No comments:
Post a Comment