BEHIND THESE WALLS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 25

BEHIND THESE WALLS

(Byron Pictures) |] CAN’T recall having seen anything from the Byron Pictures studio before and I doubt if, in a month or two, I will recall much of Behind These Walls save @ general impression that flying it out to New Zealand for the world premiére (I quote from an advertisement) did not put it in world class. In any case, it is wrong to imagine that this is a new picture, It is the French film Jericho (made in 1946) with the addition of English dialogue. It is also a salutary reminder .that not all films which com: out of France are good ones. Behind These Walls, based on a true story of the French Resistance, rarely rises above melodrama. It is characterised by stereotyped tricks and hackneyed devices of direction, by inept editing and cutting, and at times by considerable straining after effect (e.g., the ruthless realism of the prison-cell complete with dingy lavatory-pan). But when the general level of a film is low the occasional virtue protrudes. -For example, in a lengthy procession of over-acted German types, most of them caricatures, there is a strangely sympathetic and restrained picture of a German army chaplain; and a sequence showing an R.A.F. Mosquito squadron going into action at low level is excitingly photographed. But between the high points the story sagged sadly and the fact that I was in on a world premiére of sorts didn’t lighten the depression.