Customer Reviews

Carve Her Name with Pride

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Virginia McKenna ("A Town Like Alice", "Born Free") gives the performance of her career in CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE, a spellbinding and dramatic true-life account of one woman's heroic actions during the darkest days of World War II.

Young English widow Violette Szabo (McKenna) enlists to train as a British spy and in her efforts to organise a resistance network in occupied France, is taken prisoner by the Nazis. Szabo's story of courage and conviction is beautifully portrayed in this heartbreaking movie. With Paul Scofield, Jack Warner, Denise Grey, Sydney Tafler, Billie Whitelaw, Anne Leon and Nicole Stephane.

A recent vacation on Jersey, observing their history of 5 years of German occupation in the 1940s and their monuments to independence, prompted me to purchase this movie. It reminded me that difficult times grant us opportunity to become extraordinary. It is a story of courage, of wanting life and love and sacrifice to mean something. Yes the film was made a long time ago before snappy technology. The story is the story and worth seeing.

The casting information for Carve Her Name With Pride is totally wrong. Michael Caine was never in this film. The lead goes to Virginia McKenna and she is brilliant in this. I will be waiting to add this to my collection along with A Town Like Alice, another great J. Arthur Rank production.

The only criticism I have is that the first part is too long; I was more interested in learning about her experiences in France and afterwards. Some of the comments here are so snarky I'm thinking these folks either didn't watch the film at all, or did not stay with it. It is a delicate, nuanced performance esp in the lasst 20 minutes; this is a heroine we should all know & care about: McKenna helped in that regard.

I first saw this film in the late nineteen fifties and was very impressed, and seeing it again recently, compliments of Amazon.com, I was equally impressed again. Virginia McKenna plays the part of Violette Szabo beautifully, reminding us all again of the horrors of Nazism.
Truly, we should not allow ourselves to forget what the "scourge of the swastika" was all about and this film goes a long way to help us remember.

Carve was clearly written to appeal to women viewers too so they spend a lot of time on the love story. But the action scenes are terrific too. Studying Szabo and other hero's of SOE is so inspiring. If you have not, join Netflix. Their finding tools for films like this are far superior to Amazon, I have at least a dozen related films in my instant queue.

Carve Her Name With Pride, 1958 film

This movie is based on the book of the same title, a history of Violette Szabo. She volunteered for the Special Operations Executive that aided the French Resistance against Nazi Germany. Her father was British, her mother was French, and Violette spoke both languages. She worked as a saleslady in a department store, and met a soldier of the Free French. They married. Her husband died in the Battle of El Alamein. Violette was invited to join the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry to work in the war effort.

She joined the SOE to gather information and aid the French Resistance (sabotage the railroads). Unfortunately, she and her friends were attacked by the German Army. Violette resisted until her Sten gun ran out of bullets. She was captured, interrogated, tortured, and eventually sent to Ravensbruck, the German prison camp for women. She and others were executed there in 1944. Violette Szabo was awarded the George Cross posthumously and other military honors. This movie is based on the book of her life and action in Occupied France. Movies are entertainment not history, so don't complain about some details in this story.

Problem with this movie is the very short time Virginia spends in France actually doing her undercover work.
The back story of her life takes too much time, and finally tension is short, although finally it is a sad true story.

I wish that I could say this is a good film to the audience of today, but at 2 hours it's 30 minutes too long (the film consumes 50 minutes before it gets Violette to France on her first mission), an overwatered broth adhering to the straight-on conventions of the 1950s. The fear, suffering, and execution would have been too much for the 1958 movie audience, so the film limns them but weakly.

Virginia McKenna (Violette Szabo) is a pretty young English woman fluent in French from her early years. In 1940, with war looming, she meets French soldier Alain Saury, they soon marry, and he has to return to the French army. Cut to their daughter's second birthday party, when Virginia receives the dreaded telegram about her young husband.

Later she's approached by Special Operations to fly into France as a British agent. She accepts, and during her military style training meets officer Paul Scofield, and they drift towards romance. Their first mission to contact the Resistance is successful, but on her second mission she engages in a shootout with the Germans. She is captured, refuses to talk, and with two other young women is executed. (I've read that Michael Caine does appear momentarily in the glut of male prisoners on the train begging for water. And that, in reality, the three women were not executed by a spray of bullets as they stand but were made to kneel and shot in the back of the head.)

This is all a true story from World War II. I was attracted to the film by a Supplement on the DVD of "Peeping Tom," the screenplay of which was written by Leo Marks. He was a cryptographic expert in the war and was responsible for two very important concepts used by British agents in encrypting messages: a Silk Handkerchief, given to each agent, imprinted with columns of alphabet letters, and a Poem, unique for each agent, to be memorized and used in the coding process. The poem Marks wrote for Violette Szabo begins: "The life that I have/ Is all that I have/ And the life that I have/ Is yours." For the "Carve" film, the historical truth is distorted so that Violette's Frenchman, her husband to be, writes it, and recites the poem to her as they recline on the grass; thus it acquires emotional weight and is used in several places in the film, and indeed brings it to a close. (I've read that Marks, in granting permission to use the poem in the film, specfied that his name was not to be mentioned; and that he originally wrote the poem on Christmas Eve 1943 for his loved friend after she died in an airplane crash while training in Canada.)

Today, better the story of Leo Marks should be told, from his book Between Silk and Cyanide, and incorporate the many agents (such as Violettte) he strove to protect and save, and yes, there are ways to be truthful about the actual torture methods used by the Gestapo. As a second thought, a television miniseries out of England could be superb. (I've since discovered, and am watching, the 1987 series Wish Me Luck, available from Amazon.)

CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE ( 1958) Directed by Lewis Gilbert.

Starring Virginia McKenna, Jack Warner, Billie Whitelaw and Paul Scofield.

The true story of plucky English lass Violette Szabo who--after a French boyfriend is killed at Second El Alamein(presumably shot while trying to surrender) decides to do her bit by becoming a behind enemy lines spy. Finally she is sent into France to sabotage bridges on June 6, 1944..........

A typical well made stiff upper lip 50s British historical film that still plays like a footnote to THE LONGEST DAY as well as being a WW2 flick for chicks. It probably did not need to be 119 minutes and could have lost a half hour but all that said it is a good film with a pleasing cast, nice black and white photography and worth a look.

I liked it. It dramatizes a true story but I am not at all certain it is remarkable in anyway.