This film is certainly thought-provoking, and aspires to present an interesting perspective on atrocities, reprisals, and morality during a time of war.
Professing to show the horror of warfare directed against innocent civilians, it also tends to promote a particular revisionist view.
Wartime "reprisals," as practiced by the Germans against the townspeople, are shown as somehow being "justified" by the the attacks against German soldiers that occurred at the hands of non-uniformed resistance fighters.
It is a historical fact that the Germans not only practiced these "reprisals," but engaged in them to excess, not only in France, but in most of the German-occupied and invaded countries during WWII.
I found the end of the movie dialog by the French mayor difficult to believe when he declares: "I was responsible for the massacre of the townspeople because I wanted to prove my manhood by shooting the German Officers at the cafe".
This flawed view fails to make any moral distinction between the activities of armed freedom fighters seeking to repel their country's invaders after a long and sinister occupation, and the innocent men, women and children whose only crime happened to be living in the town selected for the reprisal.
If the movie fails to make the moral and historical points accurately, it does succeed as a love story with many poignant scenes in flashback. The actress Amelie Peck is a delight to behold.
The back of the DVD box for this movie claims that it is "based on the true story of Oradour-sur-Glane" whose six hundred and forty-two occupants were brutally slaughtered in the manner suggested by the film.
The historical references for this film suffer from its low budget. It depicts a lesser slaughter of fewer citizens, at the hands of just one truckload of German Soldiers. Although the uniforms looked crisp, and it appears that a few vintage wartime vehicles were available, there seemed to be no money budgeted to depict the scale of the actual event at Oradour-sur-Glane. Accordingly, it seems that the name was changed to a lesser town, and the massacre was scaled down to meet the constraints of the film's tight finances.
The film is accurate, in one sense, in that, even to this day, there is a certain amount of apathy, indifference, and controversy over what triggered the cause of these wartime atrocities in France and who exactly was responsible for it. The government of France opened the floodgates of bitter emotions during the 1950's when many of the SS soldiers were put on trial for Oradour and the nearby massacre at Tulle, which occurred a day earlier on June 9, 1944.
It did not help soothe the controversy when it was revealed that a group of these accused SS soldiers were recruited from Alsace (now a part of France, but then a land claimed by Germany).
Catherine Hicks is a beautiful and talented actress, but she is almost too beautiful for the character she plays in this movie. The viewer finds it hard to believe that her character would be with anyone like the Frenchman who "slaps her around" and subjects her to so much physical and verbal abuse at the movie's outset.
Her character would also be more believable if she spoke more than a few lines of "cafe French," since her long residency is supposed to have made her either fluent or very knowledgeable with the language.
In fact, most of the principal actors seem to struggle with awkward moments of dialog at times, not because they are bad actors, but because the script seems have needed just a few more revisions to make it seem real and believable.
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