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Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Posted By: ChumPaa

Date: 18 Nov 2015 02:53:05

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)
A Film by John Brahm
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC | MPEG 2 | 4:3 | 1h 10min | 720x480 | 29.97 fps | Lang: English | Subs: English, Spanish
Audio#1: English Stereo AC3 @ 192Kbps(2ch) | Audio#2: English Dual Mono AC3 @ 192Kbps(2ch) | Cover + Extras | 3.98 GB
Genre: Drama | War

IMDB
IMDB Rating: 6.2/10
Directed by: John Brahm
Starring: Annabella, John Sutton, Lee J. Cobb

Storyline: British Intellengence dispatches Commando Geoffrey Carter on a one-man raid to destroy a munitions plant that manufactures bombs in Nazi-occupied France. He enlists the aid of a patriotic farmer, M. Bonnard, that lives near the plant, over the objections of his daughter Odette Bonnard, who believes that the British were responsible for the fall of France. Her attitude softens toward Carter, who is living with the family as posing as a son, but Odette cannot bring herself to aid in Carter's plan because of her fear of reprisals against her family. She turns informer and the Nazis capture Carter.

Screenshots:

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Tonight We Raid Calais is filmed efficiently but with a sense of style, thanks to director John Brahm and the artful director of photography Lucien Ballard. The drama often seems stage bound and Waldo Salt's rather optimistic screenplay runs to formula, but this story of a sabotage mission is less embarrassing than many wartime propaganda entertainments. Usually things get even more far-fetched, with dauntless spies or news correspondents fooling the Germans and escaping with their blonde girlfriends while blowing up major strategic targets in their spare time.

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

This story has our dauntless hero (the not-particularly-memorable John Sutton) stumble onto bad luck while alighting from a studio-contrived landing craft. He then finds himself in a real fantasy of occupied France. The local villagers oppose their German overseers practically out in the open, and cooperate almost completely in helping Carter masquerade as a farmer. Carter wants them to start fires in their fields to guide Allied bombers to wipe out the evil Nazi munitions factory, and almost all say yes, enthusiastically. Nobody for a moment mentions what will surely happen afterwards, when the villagers have no place to hide and no way of denying their complicity; the Germans exterminated entire towns like Ourador for putting up trifling demonstrations of resistance. No, the women of Bonnard's town can't help the commando enough.

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Star Annabella was personally chosen by Abel Gance for his epic 1927 Napoleon, and came to America in 1937. She's quite good, and performed twice more in similar roles in Bomber's Moon (as a Russian doctor) and 13 Rue Madeleine with James Cagney. The script does back-flips to maintain Odette's status as a virgin, making her not the mother of a baby but the sister of its dead father. The real mother already died as well. I can only think this was done to further sanitize the character, because Howard da Silva's scurvy German wants to have sex with her. If she was a young mother, might the subplot have been considered in bad taste?

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Howard da Silva was already a popular actor and his participation in the leftist Paul Robeson film Native Land didn't affect his career at this time. But in the middle of his popularity he was blacklisted from the screen for a full ten years, 1952 - 1962. Howard Hughes had his last film Slaughter Trail re-shot to replace his starring-role scenes with another actor. Lee J. Cobb was already noted for playing older men; he's Annabella's father here but is actually two years younger than the actress! Beulah Bondi is the dotty mother who inadvertently lets the Germans know what's going on.

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

Tonight We Raid Calais ends in a rousing air raid with a happy outcome for all. The Germans are tipped to sabotage at the munitions plant, so they evacuate all the French workers (to safety). They realize what's happening only too late. By the time the signal fires are guiding the bombers, all the Germans including the high-ranking officers are in the plant, and our hero Geoffrey Carter just happens to be able to start a gun battle at the entrance, to keep them all inside. Carter and Odette exchange patriotic farewells and we're assured that all will be fine.

Tonight We Raid Calais (1943)

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