THE MOON IS DOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 264, 14 July 1944, Page 30

THE MOON IS DOWN

(20th Century-Fox)

N the past week I have seen two Hollywood accounts of life in Occupied Norway, and one was as different from the other as

the cream cakes we used to eat were different from the ersatz ‘variety we have these days. The Moon is Down represents Hollywood in one of its rare grown-up moods: it is distinctly a picture for adult minds, whereas First Comes Courage is-well, perhaps I'd better not push the comparison home, since L know several people of riper years who thought it was wonderful. The Moon is Qown is not a perfect picture *but, except for This Land is Mine (which was uneven and overcomplicated), it is the only one I have yet encountered which tackles the subject of conquest and resistance in pre-sent-day. Europe with an intelligent appreciation of what must go on in the minds of both victors and vanquished; which treats it as something more than just an excuse fore the commandos to strike at dawn after the wily heroine and the daring hero have pulled the

wool over the stupid Nazis’ eyes and made things easy for them. Many people may not like this treatment, Steinbeck’s novel and play have already landed him in hot water in some quatters, and now that the film is reaching an even wider public, I expect that the water may just about come to the boil. What is resented is Steinbeck’s suggestion that some Germans are actually human beings and that, being human, they are capable of being upset by the passive resistance, as well as by the active opposition, of the people they have subdued; that the unveiled dislike of civilians, hardening into contempt and hatred, can get on a conqueror’s nerves and convince him of the ultimate futility of his mission as certainly as can physical reprisals in the form of sabotage and assassination. But surely ‘it is absurd to pretend anything else. Having said that I should perhaps hasten to add that Steinbeck does not suggest that all the members of the Nazi occupying force in the Norwegian village of Selvik are sensitive enough to react to this sort of reception: only two or three. The others are sufficiently ---

brutal to ‘satisfy the most ardent Vansittartite and Hun-hater. And on the screen they take a more gloating delight in the cruelties they perpetrate. than. their counterparts did in .the. novel. his, and a false note of burlesque here . and there (the business with the band that plays "We're Sailing Against England"), are the two chief respects in which the film differs from the book. They are Hollywood’s gauche concessions to popular taste. Otherwise, the film is a remarkably close, often word-for-word, translation. * * * HE MOON IS DOWN advances two main arguments-that the spirit of liberty and of democracy is an intangible thing, impossible to isolate and coerce; and that "defeat is only a temporary thing." The first argument is expressed through the mild little Mayor of the village (Henry Travers) who, realising that he isthe symbol of his people’s way of life, finds unexpected depths of courage to draw on in defying the invaders; and the second argument is put into the mouth of Major Lanser, the German commandant (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). The major remembers what happened in Belgium in 1914-18; he knows that, however overwhelming the’ victory, no war is ever finally won until and unless enemies can be turned into friends; and he knows also that that (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) can never happen in Norway. "Now it all begins over again-the shooting, the hostages, the reprisals," he declares bitterly as the false quiet of the first few days of occupation in Selvik is broken by a shot through a window. It is because the German commandant is so plainly a man whom duty and force of circumstance are compelling to act in a way contrary both to his reason and his desire, and because he shows some understanding and even sympathy for his victims, that the character of Major Lanser is the most controversial in the film. But it is a homesick young Nazi lieutenant (Peter van Eyck) who supplies the story with its key phrase when, cracking under the strain, he exclaims ironically, "The flies have conquered the flypaper!" And this same young Nazi is the most warmly human of them all: it is he who is stabbed by the Norwegian girl (Dorris Bowdon) to whom he has gone when hungry for companionship and affection. Although there are Norwegian heroes in this story, there are no false heroics anywhere, no suggestion that the Germans are anything but tough opponents, and no. last-minute rescues of the "goodies" from the "baddies." The major and the mayor are treated with a little less subtlety and sensibility by Hollywood than they are in the novel, but they are treated with respect, and | I have no complaint with the way Sir — Cedric Hardwicke and Henry Travers have interpreted them; This film has about it something of the finality and inevitability of a Greek tragedy; almost all the characters-even the little quisling storekeeper (E. J. _Ballantine)-are men under compulsion, obeying forces beyond their control. It is rare to find the cinema tackling such a theme. It is rarer still to find it making a@ success of it. What’s that? You don’t like Greek drama and you do like your Nazis to be thoroughly nasty as well as stupid? Well, then, I suppose you’d better miss The Moon is Down and see instead-