FREEDOM RADIO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 113, 22 August 1941, Page 16

FREEDOM RADIO

(Columbia)

IRECTED in England by Anthony Asquith, with the stars of Cavalcade, Clive Brook and Diana Wynyard, this picture deals with one of

the most melodramatic stories of what has, in many ways, been a melodramatic war-the story of the German Freedom Station. Not unnaturally, therefore, it treats the subject very melodramatically, and not unnaturally also it doesn’t neglect the opportunity for propaganda. For both these reasons, there is a contrast between the heroes and villains of the piece so sharp that it takes one back to the old days of the screen when the " goodies" were always pure white and the "baddies" were always deepest black, whereas (if one may suggest it even about Germany) the prevailing colour of real life is grey. It is because of a lack of restraint in action, and characterisation that this film misses our highest grading-but not by much. Many people, including the Communists, have been given credit for operating the Freedom Station. (Where is it now, I wonder; we haven’t heard of it for months?) But according to this ver-

sion its originator is a Dr. Roeder (Clive Brook), a fashionable Berlin physician and Hitler's own . throat specialist, who turns in disgust from the excesses of the Nazis to this method of overthrowing them, The film is perhaps most successful in the early part, wherein it shows the doctor’s gradually increasing awareness of how his country is losing its soul to Hitler. A strong atmosphere of growing menace is built up as one by. one the former decencies of German life are sullied, the doctor’s Jewish friends are wafted away by the Gestapo, another friend, a priest, is murdered in his church, and the doctor’s wife (Miss Wynyard) succumbs to the surface attractiveness of the Nazi doctrines. At last, using his position as the Fuhrer’s doctor to protect him as well as to gain knowledge of facts embarrassing to the regime, the hero launches his -Freedom Station, with the aid of a few staunch friends. It is immediately successful, and the rest of the story is a man-hunt by the Gestapo, with the quarry dodging about all over the country. It is frequently exciting, but it is also sometimes so farfetched as to be absurd, as when the gallant doctor breaks right into the middle of one of Hitler’s big speeches

and tells the German people that they are being led straight to disaster. And how the Gestapo, talking to the doctor one minute and hearing him on the air the next, would fail to recognise immediately such a distinctive. voice as Clive Brook’s, I can’t imagine. Eventually, of course, they do hunt him down, and with him his wife, who has had a change of political heart. I, personally, think that it would have been more effective to leave their actual fate to our imagination, but the audience is in at the bitter end, though the shots which silence the doctor and his wife do not put the Freedom Station off the air. His friends carry on. In this picture, Diana Wynyard returns to movies after a long absence, but her performance suggests that we have not been missing as much as might have been imagined from the fact that when. she retired from the screen she was rated as one of its top-rank stars. In actual fact hers is not a very strong role and plenty of other actresses could have played it equally as well. -However, there are several other good performences, notably that by Clive Brook, whose development of the _ doctor’s character in the early part of the story is probably the best bit of acting he has done for some time.