10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascism's Human Cost: Moving, and Still Relevant, January 8, 2007
This review is from: So Ends Our Night (DVD)
I just saw this over the weekend for the first time on dvd, though I'd seen it in college and never quite forgot it. The impact of Erich Maria Remarque's story of German refugees in Europe must've been enormous to those few who saw this sparsely distributed movie in 1940/1941.
The Historical Context
This film, made prior to the American entry to the war but after the fall of France, may have helped to prepare the American public for the coming war, as in The Mortal Storm and The Man I Married and like the later movie, Watch on the Rhine, gave the issues involved a human face, but is much more profoundly fatalistic than any of those other movies. Even at the somewhat hopeful conclusion, and especially since we view this movie today after the Holocaust was revealed, the doomed atmosphere that pervades alot of the action is still sobering over a distance of 65 years.
I couldn't help thinking that the theme of the movie is still sadly relevant throughout the world. Another interesting aspect of the film is something that I cannot answer but hope that some well informed individual might be able to help with eventually. I don't see how this movie could've gotten a production code approval. Some of the outré aspects of the story include a woman offering herself quite frankly to a March and removing her outer garments, the fact that two characters live together--in sin, as they used to say, and the fact that a sympathetic character commits suicide, an event that the film treats as an act of heroism. The print that I saw says that the movie was made by David L. Loew-Albert Lewin, Inc., and distributed theatrically by United Artists--but could movies really be distributed much of anywhere without the explicit okay of the production code at that time? I realize that Loew and Lewin had deep connections to MGM and bigtime money in Hollywood and NY, but I really doubt if the filmmakers would've been willing or able to pay any of the fines that the Production Code office may have imposed for a violation of their principles.
Best Aspects:
I found the restrained and touching performance of Fredric March as an Aryan German who was opposed to the Nazi government to be the centerpiece of this movie, even though he's only in about half the scenes. The expression on his face in one scene in which he's trying to catch a glimpse of his wife's face in a crowd just before leaving her to go into exile is very moving. Frances Dee as the wife is very expressive in her brief, nearly silent but haunting scenes. March's resilient spirit, and his deeply effective final scene, the antics of Leonid Kinskey, and a lovely, relaxed performance from Anna Sten, add to the interest of this film for me.
Good Aspects:
Margaret Sullavan, whom I usually find to be a magnetic actress, seems at somewhat of a low ebb in this film. Yet, there is one vibrantly delivered speech that she gives about why she loves the puppy-like Glenn Ford that shows a flash of her ability to breath life into material. She is suddenly, for that one sequence an actress who makes the viewer understand that politics aside, its the connections of Sullavan, March, Ford and Dee to one another that keeps each of these characters tethered to their humanity despite everything that they are going through. Ford, playing a very believable teenager who is the child of an Aryan & Jewish marriage, is earnest and most affecting in his reminiscences of home and longing for a peaceful existence.
Technical Aspects:
The script is heavily reliant on flashbacks and narration, and at times it was a bit hard to keep track of which nation the refugees found themselves in, though overall, the strong leads and great supporting players, who also include Erich Von Stroheim, Sig Rumann, and Roman Bohnen, manage to rise above the sometimes disjointed script . The issuance of the film to dvd is welcome, but unfortunately, the picture quality of the transfer is sometimes overly bright and occasionally fuzzy, and the sound is a bit muddy at times, but it is adequate, and the good acting, compelling story and excellent direction by the underestimated John Cromwell still make it quite watchable.
In general, I'd hope that others might comment on this movie, and suggest it for viewing by those interested in that period's "premature" anti-fascist films.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A major work, ahead of its time, December 23, 2007
This review is from: So Ends Our Night (DVD)
This is an unjustly neglected work: complex, subtle, and harrowing in its treatment of one of the major tragedies of the 20th Century: the rise of Nazi Germany and the persecution of that murderous regime of jews and of course, any opponents.
One of the more striking features of the film is that it was released in 1941, well before the full horror of the Nazi concentration camps was made known to the world, and yet "So Ends our Night" eerily captures the totalitarian abomination taking over Europe at the time.
The film, directed by John Cromwell, is based on the novel "Floatsam" by Erich Maria Remarque, the author of "All Quiet on the Western Front" and whose books were burned and banned by the Nazi regime. Having to flee Germany himself to escape certain death, Remarque was more than well suited to document the plight of "people without a passport", Jewish refugees, and in a minor level, German dissidents, then flooding Europe and trying to escape the Nazi extermination campaign.
The film takes place in 1937 and follows the plight of a couple of young German Jewish refugees (hauntingly played by Margaret Sullavan and Glenn Ford) and a hunted dissident German officer chased by the Nazis (a portrait in courage by Fredric March), but whose wife (an unforgettable Frances Dee) has remained in Germany.
As they go from one country to another, suffering persecution, humiliation, betratyal, "So Ends Our Night" pulls no punches in portraying the despair of these exiles, wanted or welcomed by no one, facing cold and indifferent bureaucracies, but helped along by small acts of kindness.
One of the reasons that this film might not be better known today is that it avoids all the conventional trappings of Hollywood melodrama of the time, there is no uplift here, every apparent turn in the luck of the characters is followed by an equally adverse turn. There are scenes here which would not be shown again for decades in mainstream entertainment, Sullavan (a young chemist) being rejected violently by her German lover for compromising his career because of her being Jewish; Ford, receiving from a clerk the shocking news of his father's suicide; the ferocity of a Nazi customs official interrogating Fredric March when reentering Germany.
This kind of situations, and the complex treatment of them, was just not the norm in Hollywood at the time, nor for decades to come. The film is really closer in tone to films like Jan Kadar's masterpiece "The Shop on Main Street" or Istvan Szabo's "Confidence", which also dealt with the inhuman strain on relationships provoked by this monstrous regime.
That neither Cromwell nor any of the film stars, although well known and respected, are part of the "official canon", is also probably a cause of the film not being better known. Cromwell's career was sidetracked by the blacklist, and Sullavan's by personal tragedy.
March and Ford were quite well known, but never achieved maximum stardom, and this movie contains some of their finest moments on screen. Sullavan is usually described as luminous, and this movie will show you why. And Frances Dee, as March's wife, is a revelation.
Obviously there are some issues rights too, as this DVD is not released by any of the major studios, but by VCI Entertainment, which brings us to an important point. Although, according to a statement at the beginning, the film has been restored, it is far from perfect: there are a couple of rough patches, and the extras are anemic. Some scenes in the DVD box are not actually shown in the film, so we can only hope for a better, more thorough restoration.
That should not prevent anyone from seeing this magnificent film.
In this day and age, of open borders, immigration polemics, "So Ends Our Night" is still sadly, powerfully relevant.
Watch it by all means. I dare you to forget the market scene (justly admired by critic Pauline Kael) in which Fredric March and Frances Dee, after two years of not seeing each other, try to connect in a public market, with him walking behind her, and she not being able to turn back and see his face. Some say it's one of the greatest scenes in cinema, and it might well be.
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