Word: steinbeck
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Opening in Stockholm last month, John Steinbeck's anti-Nazi, inferentially Norwegian The Moon Is Down proved such a smash that it speedily moved to a bigger theater. Swedish critics, speaking of evergrowing Norwegian resistance, praised Steinbeck for prophetic insight, remarked that The Moon Is Down is truer today than when it was written...
They are harsher in the movie than in the novel or the play, and so is their dramatic impact. In the movie (scenario by Nunnally Johnson, who also did Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath) the camera witnesses many important events that take place offstage in the play. The picture shows the Nazi invaders' confident march into the mining village of Selvik, their mowing down of a pitiful dozen of Norwegian soldiers, the villagers' terror and confusion. Then, in the sharp language of action rather than introspective comment, it describes the villagers' growing hatred and resistance...
...mayor; so does Dorris Bowdon (Mrs. Nunnally Johnson) as the slayer of a Nazi officer who tries to seduce her. In the story's most controversial role, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, as the Nazi commander, looks more like a cold-blooded Junker than like the unmilitary officer described by Steinbeck...
...chief interest, with the movie as with the book and play, lies in Steinbeck's central thesis: that Nazis are vulnerable to hatred and contempt. The more the picture attempts to make this theme explicit, the more it underlines the fact that Steinbeck's premise is questionable psychology. Conquerors do not expect to be loved, and seldom go to pieces because the conquered fail to embrace them. The Moon is Down may seem to many audiences an extraordinarily naive view of the facts of Nazi life...
...Steinbeck's story has had the attention that a pertinent argument deserves. As a book it sold nearly 1,000,000 copies and as a play, after a poor start on Broadway, where it ran only nine weeks, it was a smash on the road. Twentieth Century-Fox paid Steinbeck a record $300,000 for the movie rights...