Word: gestapoed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...killing of Hitler's Hangman Reinhard Heydrich by the Czecho-Slovakian underground is the springboard from which Hangmen's characters take their dives. These include a shrewd Gestapo inspector (Alexander Granach) who makes it very tough for Prague's patriotic citizens to hide Heydrich's killer, one Dr. Svoboda (Brian Donlevy); a venerable professor (Walter Brennan) who gives his life to thwart the dastardly inspector; the professor's pretty daughter (Anna Lee) who gives her reputation-to throw the inspector off the scent, she lets herself be discovered in Dr. Svoboda's bedroom...
Customers want lure, and the little boites are adding token chorus lines, the big spots sultrier ones. Even more, customers want laughs: the comics are the town's brightest notes and biggest draws. (Most ubiquitous gag: "My mother-in-law is the Gestapo in bloomers...
...unusually creditable job. Paul Henreid of "Now Voyager" fame does a sympathetic job on a Czech patriot, and handles his anti-fascist speeches with meritable tact. Claude Rains is a superb Vichy superintendent of police, while Conrad Veidt does an excellent job on a stock Hollywood character--the Gestapo chief...
...setting is a peculiarly American Cafe American in Casablanca, before it became a meeting place for conferring diplomats. The traffic in human beings that serves as the backdrop of the story makes for interest per sc. But when it is combined with the Gestapo pursuit of a Czech underground leader, whose wife is enamoured, Continental style, with an American style, last-time-I-saw Paris lover, the plot, as the saying goes, thickens...
...conglomerate which might easily have slipped into run-of-the-mile Hollywood caricatures, manage, with the aid of some smooth dialogue to over shadow the big three on numerous occasions, Claude Raines, as the boot-licking, opportunistic Vichy chief of police is at his best. Conrad Veidt plays a Gestapo chief who, unlike the usual blustering buffon that Hollywood Nazis usually are, is more sinister than laughable. Peter Lorre, an unseen corpse after the first few scenes, and Dooley Wilson, playing "As Time Goes By" to repair broken hearts, complete the list of ingredients in this North African melting...