Noble .....and rather tedious I took the DVD of this famous film off the shelf the other evening and watched it again after 12 years, to see if it still held up or if I liked it an better. The answer is no. It is a typical well mounted Warner Bros "A" picture, with handsome production values and a good score from Steiner, but it has not worn very well as drama.
Although attempts have been made to open out the original play with exterior scenes in Washington, at the Germam Embassy and also in the grounds of the Farrelly mansion (filmed at the old Busch Gardens) , the whole film is fairly set- bound, betraying its theatrical origins.
Paul Lukas, a good actor if not a great one, repeats his much admired and very earnest Broadway portrayal as a German anti-Fascist and won the Best Actor Oscar, probably because of the times in which this film was shown. He has a few good moments but the performance is competent at best, not grippingly memorable.
Bette Davis is woefully miscast as his wife. She took the role as a favour to Hal Wallis who needed a big name on the posters to ensure box office returns would justify the expense (the rights to the play had cost Jack Warner a whopping $150,000)
She does her best to underplay and suppress her usual performance tricks, not entirely successfully (Interestingly, she does not smoke - along with DECEPTION, this is one of her few contemporary films where she does not),.
But she is far too mannered and theatrical for the part, which was built up for her and expanded from the play. It is a pity that the great Mady Christians (who played the role on Broadway) was not asked to reprise her role.
More pleasure is to be found in the supportng roles - especially Lucile Watson as the matriarch (also reprising her stage performance) and the superb English actor Henry Daniell as an icily cynical German Baron. Beulah Bondi is totally wasted as a French housekeeper.
Much has been made by others reviewing this film on IMDB, of how it compares to Casablanca (released the same year) which is far superior in every respect.
Comparisons are not really that relevant except that, while almost every line of dialogue in Casablanca is remembered and quoted, especially Humphrey Bogart's 'hill of beans' speech, not one line of Ms Hellmann's wordy, pompous screenplay is recalled today.
It is a very wordy script indeed and there are many longeurs in the first half. Moreover, the world in which the Farrrelly's live seems almost like a Hollywood fantasy now, with a grand palladian mansion that would not look out of place in GONE WITH THE WIND, and a large staff of black servants all tugging their forelocks and saying 'Yes'm' at every opportunity. The only ingredient missing in all this is the great Hattie MacDaniel, who was under contact to Warners then and would surely have injected some much needed humour to the proceedings.
At one point, the Nazi-sympathising Rumanian Count de Brancovis (George Coulouris) says to Kurt Muller (Lukas) that he cannot place his accent or from which part of Germany he comes. I am not surprised. Lukas was not German but Hungarian, born in Budapest. He was also Jewish, though no mention of his racial origins occur in the script.
This film seems much longer than its 114 minutes running time, and I doubt it will get any better with the passing of time.