“Watch on the Rhine” has arrived where all successful things one day arrive—in the movies, where it is still a good play and one of exceeding intensity. It faces its task of showing a veteran anti-Fascist’s mind, as well as that of a Rumanian ne’er-do-well who took up with the Nazis, with unusual frankness and purpose, but operates in a conflict which is inadequate to bringing out a conclusive expression of the problem. A picks B’s briefcase, proceeds to blackmail B with evidence of anti-Fascist activities found there and gets shot by B—but even so it achieves far more seriousness than the usual reworked Superman script. In the conception of the hero the noblest realization of anti-Fascism is achieved. He is of such stature and humanity that through him or in conflict with him the war’s purpose for both the Allies and Nazis can be felt.
Nothing will bring out the handkerchiefs in a movie audience in such number as a scene which shows someone returning to his mother after years of separation, or the same thing in reverse, some one leaving, perhaps forever. “Watch on the Rhine” repeats this mechanism of returning or parting and its overwhelming sadness a good many times. In the course of her returning, the long absent daughter, Bette Davis, is shown in her reactions to her childhood home, her mother, to her brother and to her old nurse. Later her husband takes leave of her, of his children individually and together, his brother-in-law and mother-in-law, and the thing ends up with the son telling his mother he too must soon leave. Its clearest illumination of its problem is in this parting-returning sadness; you are made to feel that Fascism is worth fighting against if such noble people who deserve only happiness are willing to go through such pain.
The filming of Lillian Hellman’s play was put under the too reverential care of Herman Shumlin, who directed it, and Dashiell Hammett, who adapted it, and an odd bundle turned up. Their aim (through an introduction and coda have been clapped fore and aft the orginal structure) was to have you see an exact version of the play, but not a static movie—and they succeeded exactly on both counts. It is the dialogue and acting taken straight from the play which are so damaging to the movie. The dialogue has a cold, precious, triple-duty nature, that doesn’t seem to come out of the people who deliver it, and it is enunciated as to an audience that might not hear in the back rows of the gallery (not loudly, but explicitly). One of Miss Hellman’s greatest virtues is an ability to spread a rich, human group of characters over her plays, but where her lines may have developed the character sufficiently on the stage they are, as movie lines, so overpacked that they exist as a thing apart from the characters. The children, for instance, have lines to say which advance them nowhere either as children or as adult-children, which the three Muller kids are supposed to be. Their speeches achieve, as do so many speeches in the movie, a certain monumentality simply as speeches, but leave the character stranded behind.
The major part of the playing gets this same woodenness, or lack of connection, between any or all of the following—the look of the person, his pantomime, the character he is supposed to be, or the nature of the particular lines he is saying. The one exception to this, and the reason for much of the movie’s success, is the performance of Paul Lukas as Kurt Muller. His portrait is the only one that is sufficiently mobile for the screen, and where the mobility, as expressed in pantomime, is always natural and understandable for the character played. In the case of Lucile Watson, Donald Woods and the children there is not enough mobility, and in the case of Beulah Bondi, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Miss Davis there is too much.
“Watch on the Rhine” is on the whole a satisfactory movie which holds its interest tightly and achieves considerable compassion.
September 13, 1943