Little remembered John Steinbeck novel, presumably rushed out to catch an early moment in WWII, made fast & cheap @ 20th/Fox on still-standing sets from HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY/’41, improbably repurposed from Welsh coal mining town to Norwegian iron ore city. Similarly repurposed, Irving Pichel, VALLEY’s narrator, here as straightforward director. (He acts in it too, that’s Pichel reading dynamite instructions.) The familiar story shows a small local militia quickly succumbing to Nazi invaders, helped by a local Quisling figure, who are soon crippled by their own overbearing regulations and the discovery that a free people will never be won over by brute force and retribution executions. A starless ensemble cast shines in its older character actors (Cedric Hardwicke, Henry Travers, Margaret Wycherly, honorary oldster Lee J. Cobb), but the young people barely register. (Though one did off-screen as wan leading lady Dorris Bowdon gave up acting for a successful marriage to this film’s producer/writer Nunnally Johnson.) And that’s not all that’s out of whack as conceptually strong situations aren’t properly set up. Ditto on relationships. Missed opportunities in a race to get this into theaters before events (and a better competing film*) overtook it.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Hoping familiarity with the set would keep him one step ahead, they also kept VALLEY cinematographer Arthur Miller, but he phones it in.
DOUBLE-BILL: *That better competing Hollywood film on small town Norwegian resistance was Lewis Milestone’s superb EDGE OF DARKNESS, out just months later with Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Walter Huston & Judith Anderson.
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