Unpublished Story (1942) User Reviews (15)

Better Than You'd Expect

[Terrell-4 · 7/10 · 2 August 2004]

An English journalist just back from Dunkirk writes a story blasting a London-based peace- in-our-time organization, but the story is killed by a government agency. Are there Nazi sympathizers or just cautious bureaucrats in the agency? Is the peace group led by innocent dupes or by ruthless Nazi agents? The reporter intends to find out.

The movie isn't A-list, but it's better than a programmer. It's a craftsman-like piece of work. In feature roles are two first-rate British character actors, Roland Culver (The Pallisers, Dead of Night, On Approval) and Miles Malleson (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit).

From Dunkirk to the Blitz to Valerie Hobson

[boblipton · 7/10 · 11 October 2018]

Richard Greene is a newspaperman covering the retreat in Northern France. When get gets back to his paper, he dictates his story and collapses. When he arises to pursue the news, a peace-at-any-cost movement, the Blitz, and novice newspaperwoman Valerie Hobson occupy his attention.

It's a pretty good battle-of-the-sexes story set amidst the darkest days of the War, and besides the leads, there are some fine performers on hand: Basil Radford as a censor who may have a little more on the ball; George Carney as a public-house owner who insists that people enter through the bombed-out door instead of the bombed-out window; and other welcome movie regulars like Roland Culver and Miles Malleson. Director Harold French gets good performances out of everyone, and if the propaganda seems laid on too thick for modern tastes, it's what was in style at the moment.

Miss Hobson's star was in the ascendant. She was married to the film's producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan. It was the fourth of nine pictures they would work on together.

Stop the Presses! This is no time for peace!

[mark.waltz · 7/10 · 6 February 2013]

That is the motive of British correspondents Valarie Hobson and Richard Greene in this newspaper war drama about the revelation that a supposed group of protesters for peace are actually a front for Nazi spies trying to stir up trouble in England. This takes place during the London blitz when nightly raids and bunkers for the protection of the people still out on the streets during an air raid was a regular occurrence. The blitz scenes are extremely realistic, especially one when Greene rescues Hobson from a phone booth while a nearby building is about to collapse. Basil Radford is excellent as a speaker of the peace convention who learns the truth about his leaders a bit too late. The cinema warned us about the enemy in our own camps many times on-screen, whether through newspaper dramas like this or the adventures of a gambler in "All Through the Night".

Britain Sticks it Out

[mickcsavage · 7/10 · 20 June 2022]

Well produced and - in the supporting roles at least - well acted, though the two leads, Greene and Hobson, give off the odd splinter or two. (Basil Radford weighs in with a very watchable turn as the undercover Intelligence Officer).

The story is a variation on the 5th column scare, which had well-worn currency in wartime England of course, but manages to steer clear of the most obvious clichés.

Interesting and fairly authentic view of London in wartime.

common British WW II story

[ksf-2 · 7/10 · 20 December 2010]

One of the films made by Two Cities Films in the 1940s and 1950s, this is a mostly, well-done story of newspaper reporters running into fifth-columnists within their midst in Britain during WW II. The editor of the paper and some other characters say some silly lines, but they can be overlooked. Richard Greene, Valerie Hobson, and Basil Radford star in this predictable spy thriller, showing the realities of bombed out London, although much of it is a background screen projection. The plot brings up the usual "Do we fight back or acquiesce?" wartime debate.

Hobson had played Elizabeth in Bride of Frankenstein with the master B. Karloff in 1935. Greene was Sir Henry Baskerville opposite Basil Rathbone prior to "Unpublished...", and would later play Robin Hood in the British TV series for several years. Two Cities Films was part by the Rank Organization, which made films for many years. The Rank Organization would later be turned into a casino operator, which is still operating as a public company in England. Another interesting tidbit is Hobson's marriage to producer/writer Anthoney Havelock-Allen; she appears to have met and married him in 1939, and made nine films together. Sadly, they divorced in 1952, and she only made a couple more films after that...

Reporters During the Blitz

[rmax304823 · 7/10 · 26 September 2012]

Fast and sometimes exciting tale of a newspaper during the London blitz, amid Nazi conspiracies to undermine morale.

Richard Greene is the correspondent who makes his way back to his Fleet Street newspaper from Dunkirk and Valerie Hobson is the novice lady reporter who is reassigned from the food column to stories of more substance.

One of the subjects is the People for Peace, a small but busy group of men claiming that Hitler actually has the morality of a Buddhist monk or something. One of their henchmen is an almost unrecognizably young Andre Morell, putting on a curious accent. Their motto is "Peace in Our Time." Poor Neville Chamberlain. He could have prevented World War II simply by declaring war on Germany at the Munich meetings.

The two intrepid reporters, dashing about the strepitous city, barely escaping the collapse of burning walls, expose the pernicious cabal and fall in love in front of a backdrop of the city in ruins except for the dome of St. Paul's.

At the climax, the endearing Scotsman who edits the paper reads tomorrow's lead, which goes something like, "Goering has said he will bomb London flat because it is the heart. Very well. The heart will continue to beat." The reason the line is memorable is not so much for its defiant quality but because, a few years later, the Allies were demolishing one German city after another and the ruins were papered over with signs proclaiming, "Unsere Mauern brechen, unsere Herzen nicht," precisely the same sentiment and a similar analogy. And in fact the post-war Strategic Bombing Survey found that bombs were very good at tearing up cities but poor at breaking citizens' morale.

But let's get back to Valerie Hobson. She's tall, slender, beautiful, and oozes elegance. She looks rather like Cate Blanchett except that she lacks Blanchett's extraordinary eyes. Richard Greene is adequate as the heroic reporter who helps save Hobson's bacon from the likes of that villainous, scowling Andre Morell.

It's not a big budget movie but the production values are high enough so that we're not distracted by substandard sets. And there's hardly a dull moment -- or a brutal one. No scenes of battle and only a bit of gunfire towards the end. And a nice, familiar cast, with Basil Radford and Miles Malleson in support. Sometimes it seemed that the British film industry had only half a dozen principal performers during the war, and no more than double that number into the 50s.

Other movies have been made about the blitz but they're either sentimental stories of worried families, like "Mrs. Miniver" or semi-autobiographical and more realistic accounts like John Boorman's "Hope and Glory." This one avoids sentimentality almost completely in favor of a sort of "training film" approach, only instead of "Assembly And Use Of The Sten Gun," it's "Optimal Responses to Bombing." That last scene, with the two lovers posed against a dim sun rising over a ruined urban landscape is touching and informative. It's a useful reminder of just how destructive war can be. America hasn't fought a war on its own ground for 150 years.

A reminder might stimulate our thoughts a bit more, at least among those of us who seem so anxious to kill them all and let God sort them out. The only people who seem more warlike than those who have never known war are those who have never known anything else. I blame hormones. We have to get rid of all that testosterone. Imagine if all the men in the world were turned overnight into fairies. All they would do is try to insult each other to death.

Worthwhile Viewing

[JHC3 · 8/10 · 24 April 2004]

British war correspondent Bob Randall (Greene) personally witnesses the Allied defeat in France in May of 1940. After a harrowing experience, he is fortunate to be evacuated to England. He immediately resumes his position as a reporter

for a major London newspaper.

While reporting daily news events, he discovers a society of pacifists, the

People for Peace. Bob is incensed by this group, believing their activities are defeatist and are only advancing the Nazi cause. Unknown to the public, this group has been infiltrated by German agents who manipulate the society to sow despair among the British people.

As the Germans bomb British cities, Bob makes it his personal mission to report on the activities of this group. He finds opposition among reporters who want free speech and British censors who, for security reasons, don't want the story published. Bob is eventually joined by another reporter, Carol Bennett

(Hobson), who helps expose the enemy in their midst.

This well made wartime film includes elements of quiet and very effective

humor. This offsets the grim nature of war against the civilian population of London. Recommended.

Journalists hunt Fifth Columnists in this propaganda piece

[Leofwine_draca · 5/10 · 23 April 2017]

UNPUBLISHED STORY is a standard British WW2 propaganda piece; the setting this time is London at the height of the Blitz, in which unsuspecting pedestrians could be devastated by falling bombs without warning. The film is created as a kind of warning against the threat of Fifth Columnists, i.e. Nazi sympathisers, seeking to destabilise society. The worst thing about it is the title, which could be about any boring old thing.

This film is rather similar to many others of the era. It's quite snappy and straightforward, not particularly memorable but watchable enough for the time. They always seem to assemble a decent cast in these pictures and so it is the case here. Valerie Hobson, noted for her Universal horror roles, is the dedicated journalist working to expose a German spy ring, and Richard Greene gives solid support as her equal. Basil Radford is reliably fun and the likes of Andre Morell and Miles Malleson show up in support. The film is quite good without being brilliant, and serves its purpose well enough.

A superior wartime drama--without lots of hysterics and full of realism.

[planktonrules · 9/10 · 29 June 2013]

"Unpublished Story" is a very unique look into Britain during the war years. In many ways, it comes off a bit like a documentary--with events unfolding shortly after they happened for real. However, it is a drama--one based, in part, on real events and real Nazi-backed movements within Allied nations.

The film begins with a reporter, Bob Randall (Richard Greene) straggling in from the Dunkirk boat lift. He's dead tired but anxious to report what he saw--in particular, fifth columnists (i.e., Nazi agents posing as regular French citizens) who helped the Germans to topple France. However, to his surprise, he finds that folks in Britain STILL don't want to come to terms with this--and so-called 'peace' or 'appeasement' groups within the UK STILL are pushing for a peaceful settlement to the Nazis--even though the war was raging. But Bob is relentless and with the help of a new lady reporter (Valerie Hobson), they doggedly follow these groups and dig deeper. Not surprisingly, they find very bad people behind all of this.

This is a very fascinating view of the war--through the eyes of the Brits and discussing a lot of things you rarely see through normal documentary films--the fear, the Home Guard, hysteria and the Blitz. To help matters, the acting is amazingly good--very realistic and subdued. It also helped that the film avoided many of the clichés and overly jingoistic material that sometimes filled Hollywood's wartime dramas. My only real complaint, and it's a tiny one, is the lousy use of rear projection in the scene outside St. Paul's during the Blitz.

Jiggery-pokery in the orbit of Uranus

[AAdaSC · 4/10 · 19 December 2015]

Reporter Richard Greene (Randall) returns from Dunkirk and heads straight to his newspaper HQ to tell the story. He is motivated to get the truth to the public and cannot abide peace sympathisers such as the "People for Peace" movement who he wants to expose. However, this group seems to have an ulterior motive. Valerie Hobson (Carol) is a rookie reporter who joins him in his adventures.

Well, it's all rather boring. The accents are quite difficult to understand – you have to adjust yourself to the rapid plumy diction. What on earth are they saying? The Scottish bloke speaks the most clearly! Once you get over this you wait for a plot but after about 50 minutes there still isn't anything going on. It's a film about reporters during WW2 but no strong lead story. What is this film about? Worse, we have to follow proceedings as led by the thoroughly dislikable Richard Greene. The rest of the cast also fall flat apart from Valerie Hobson. You spend a lot of this film waiting for something to happen and daydreaming about better things.

Superior early wartime film about 'peace societies' with real Blitz footage

[robert-temple-1 · 8/10 · 22 October 2010]

This is a superior early wartime 'message picture' containing a great deal of real footage of the London Blitz, not all of which I recognised. Richard Greene and Valerie Hobson play two journalists working for the newspaper, the London Gazette, and much of the film takes place in the newsroom. The film's plot largely concerns a British 'peace society' which has been heavily infiltrated by Nazi agents. Anyone who doubts that that is how things worked with the Nazis has only to read the two books INSIDE THE GESTAPO and INSIDE INFORMATION by the high-ranking Gestapo defector (who reported directly to Heydrich) Hansjuergen Koehler to get the true picture. That is precisely how the Gestapo used the 'peace societies', as fronts for espionage and subversion. The Soviet Union did the same thing. It is such a standard and obvious technique that it is a wonder that anyone is left who does not see it clearly, but there are always fools aplenty. This film's message is thus very direct, but also very correct. It is warning the British public not only about appeasers, which abounded in Britain (Neville Chamberlain being the most prominent!), but about the woolly-headed idealists pursuing 'peace', which simply cannot be done with people like the Nazis. (See Dame Flora Robson's amazing performance in GUNS AT BATASI, 1964, for perhaps the best portrayal of a 'peace junkie' out of her depth.) There are numerous old faithfuls in the supporting cast, Basil Radford as a good buy, Roland Culver as a bad guy, Andre Morrell as a Gestapo agent, Frederick Cooper as a 'peace junkie' who discovers he has been manipulated by the Nazis and who then is to be seen pouring more sweat from terror than if he had been under twenty arc lights, and plenty of other excellent character actors. The film is well directed by Harold French, one of the directors of the three excellent Somerset Maugham anthologies (QUARTET, TRIO, and ENCORE), and who lived to be 100 years old (1897-1997)! Strange to think the last feature film he directed was in 1955 (THE MAN WHO LOVED REDHEADS with Moira Shearer) and that he then lived another 42 years. I wonder what he was doing. The film is based on a story by its producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, famous for producing David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER (for which he was uncredited), Lean's GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Lean's RYAN'S DAUGHTER, Franco Zeffirelli's ROMEO AND JULIET, and many more. He died in 2003, just before turning 99. So between them, the producer and the director of this film lived for just under 200 years. What were they taking? Maybe if we all watch this film 100 times we will all live forever.

Peace in our time

[Prismark10 · 5/10 · 16 May 2017]

Unpublished Story is a propaganda piece with almost a documentary type setting in parts when it shows the effects of the Nazi bombings on Londoners.

Bob Randall (Richard Greene) and Carole Bennett (Valerie Hobson) are journalists investigating a pacifist group called People For Peace. The group is in effect taken over by Nazi fifth columnists to spread misinformation that resistance is futile.

Basil Radford plays Lamb, the man from the ministry with the habit to spike any news story not in the national interest.

It is an intriguing look at the peace movement at the time and the government at the time would had been aware that some unsavoury types would attempt to hijack such groups.

The film is rather uneven, you see brutal effects of the bombings but this is mixed with humour which sits rather inappropriately. The story of the secret Nazi infiltrators is not well told and at times appears confusing with little action regarding the main plot.

Absolutely horrifying! A most important and truly remarkable film!

[JohnHowardReid · 10/10 · 6 April 2018]

A Two Cities Film, made at D & P Studios, Denham, presented by J. Arthur Rank, released through Columbia Pictures Corp. Not copyrighted in the U.S.A. No New York opening. U.S. release: 11 April 1942. U.K. release: 10 August 1942. Australian release: 23 September 1943 (sic). 8,444 feet. 93½ minutes.

SYNOPSIS: British newspaperman tangles with Nazi spies in London during the blitz.

COMMENT: Despite some very conventional characters and plot strands in this wartime newspaper yarn, this is a truly remarkable film. Aside from the actuality footage of the London blitz which is skilfully worked into the fabric of the movie itself - horrifying, unbelievable material of human ingenuity, courage, perseverance and insistence on "normalcy" in the face of incredibly wanton destruction, peril and danger - there are a number of astonishing set-pieces including an extended dolly shot of vast crowds of evacuated Dunkirk servicemen at a railway station and a skilfully disorienting tracking shot down a London street in a black-out. The lighting, compositions and camera movement often reveal an imaginative skill far beyond the normal rather humdrum standards of director Harold French. At times indeed the terrifyingly real-life bizarreness of the movie's background overshadows the story - particularly Valerie Hobson's part in it which has been struck from the cliched mould of novice girl reporter makes good (though she does figure in an edge-of-the-seat cliffhanger bit of action which would put any Hollywood serial to shame).

Greene is also solidly conventional though he does have opportunities to show his mettle. The other players are likewise predictably cast and serve their roles with the fine exactitudes we might expect, though we should note Ronald Shiner in a small but straight role, and the wonderfully realistic portrait of Frederick Cooper as the belittled Trapes.

Production values are amazingly lavish. Although there's plenty of vividly staged action, it is even more for its contemporary insight into London living in the truly horrifying nights of 1941-42, that merits Unpublished Story a top place in British cinema.

Documentary journalism during the blitz jumping into spies

[clanciai · 9/10 · 2 October 2018]

The lasting value of this film is the almost documentary scenes from the blitz in the shelters with a lot of insights into ordinary people and, above all, a newspaper being bombed and getting on with the work anyway. This is 1942 in the worst heat of the war but after the blitz, the film starts with the Dunkirk trauma with Richard Greene getting away from France with one of the last boats and then continuing his reporting business under the blitz of London, where he runs into lovely Valerie Hobson and a spy circle, masked as a movement for "Peace in Our Time", one of the most ironic headlines in history. But in the heart of the intrigue is a small man Trapes (Frederick Cooper in a very memorable performance), who actually believes in peace and preaches it with all the good faith of Neville Chamberlain, and his case is the most interesting human part of the film. He is bombed out, like so many others, and his whole world is shattered, which makes him wake up to a new reality, and he takes the consequences, even if they turn to be fatal. Richard Greene becomes secondary in all this, while it's London under the blitz which is the main actor of this almost documentary of the darkest hour of Britain in London.

Unrecorded history

[jarrodmcdonald-1 · 5 April 2023]

By mid-1942, American studios and British studios were turning out quite a few wartime propaganda films. UNPUBLISHED STORY is a noteworthy British example. Leading man Richard Greene-- who started his career at age 15 (he was from a theatrical family)-- had already been to Hollywood and back. At this point, he was an established box office name on both sides of the Atlantic.

When he was making films at 20th Century Fox in the late 1930s, he played more mature characters. For example, in THE LITTLE PRINCESS, he was cast as Shirley Temple's father, though he was only nine years older than her! Greene probably would have continued his career at Fox if not for the war, though he did return to Hollywood in the postwar period. But since he was unable to enlist in the military in the U. S. or in Canada, he went back to his native Britain in 1941 to join up with the Lancers, an army regiment.

During his time with the Lancers, Greene would occasionally be given leave to make films in London. These were usually flag waivers that helped boost the morale of movie goers. In 1942, he starred in UNPUBLISHED STORY with Valerie Hobson, in what may be seen as a variation of Hitchcock's FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT.

Both Greene and Hobson are reporters for a fictional London newspaper whose attempts to write about the war are often censored by the boss, for different reasons. In Hobson's case, it is because she's a woman who is supposed to be sticking to a column about fashion; and in Greene's case, it is because he has found out about a Nazi group that could pose a danger to national security.

Of course, Hobson teams up with Greene behind their editor's back, since she is still angling for her own glory and a chance to report something more meaningful than the season's newest dresses. Part of the duo's work undercover has them joining a pacifist group run by Nazis whose goal is to instill anti-war sentiment among the British people, so that Britain will be politically divided and easier for the Germans to conquer. It's an interesting theme to explore in a motion picture.

While ferreting out the Nazis, our lead characters naturally fall in love and get put into increasingly dangerous situations. Especially when the Nazis realize what they are up to in trying to expose the so-called pacifists.

It all leads to an exciting turning point, with a few betrayals along the way. The film's title comes from the fact that Greene and Hobson are unable to publish the big story they've written during this time, because the war is still not over and counter-intelligence strategies depend upon keeping the Germans off-guard as things progress from here.

Greene and Hobson do a splendid job in the main roles. Greene, only 24 at this stage, is playing a character closer to his actual age for a change. As always, he has a nice way of delivering his lines, combining authoritarian qualities with sarcasm. Whereas Hobson excels at playing an early feminist type character who is eager to go outside her normal comfort zone to make a difference.

UNPUBLISHED STORY was produced by Hobson's husband Anthony Havelock-Allan. Together they would go on to make several more highly regarded features...including BLANCHE FURY (1948).