SQUADRON-LEADER X
(RKO-British)
NOTHER- good British _ @ffort. Don’t be surprised if you find it reminds you of 49th Parallel, for it has the
same star (Eric Portman), the same script-writer (Emeric Pressburger), and basically the same Sag as that picture — a man-hunt, with Nazi as quarry ‘and a whole nation in pursuit of him. But Squadron-Leader X avoids the major psychological blunder of arousing sympathy for the hunted which made 49th Parallel such a dubious piece of propaganda. What 49th Parallel showed-although it didn’t mean to-was that a true Nazi is imbued with unswerving and completely selfless purpose, untiring energy, boundless resourcefulness and great courage, and is only to be beaten by trickery. However, you need shed no tears for Mr. Portman’s Nazi in this new film, and your sporting instincts are not likely to be aroused on his behalf. He is a thoroughly nasty job of work, arrogant, treacherous, and lily-livered-a Luftwaffe ace who, by bad luck, finds himself in England masquerading as a squadron-leader in the R.A.F., and who spends the rest of the story trying to get out of the country again and back to Belgium. How he happens to land him-. self in this embarrassing predicament is too good a bit of script-writing to spoil by divulging it here: so are some of the tricks he gets up to in order to persuade certain people in England to give aid and comfort to one of His Majesty’s enemies; or the reason why the agents of the Gestapo in London are just as keen to blot him out as are the British security officers. But it can be revealed that the Nazi’s ultimate fate is a particularly lyrical example of poetic justice, If you put. them under the microscope, various situations and devices in ‘the plot would be shown up as improbable — the film, in fact, is rather too ingenious a piece of propagandist entertainment to be true. At the same time, several good performances (particularly by Martin Miller as a former Nazi sympathiser in London, as well as by Portman himself), and good direction by Lance Comfort, manage to make the whole thing seem plausible as well as highly exciting. Squadron-Leader X should, in brief, give you a very good run for your money.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19440728.2.39.1.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 266, 28 July 1944, Page 23
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378SQUADRON-LEADER X New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 266, 28 July 1944, Page 23
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