Errol Flynn was Star of the Month back in April, and that gave me the chance to record some of his movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Uncertain Glory. As Flynn was at Warner Bros. for many years, it's unsurprising that a lot of his movies have gotten DVD releases courtesy of the Warner Archive.
It's sometime in 1943 in France, which if you know your history you will know is smack dab in the middle of World War II, and more specifically, the Nazi occupation of France. Something not commonly mentioned is that even in wartime, and in countries occupied by a foreign power, there's still your standard-issue crime that has nothing to do with the war situation going on. Flynn plays Jean Picard, a man who's sentenced to the guillotine for having committed a murder. However, with the war on, the prison gets bombed and Picard is able to escape just in time!
The authorities, who seem to permit a surprisingly free press, have police inspector Marcel Bonet (Paul Lukas) try to track down Picard so that Picard can be brought back to justice and executed. (There's no intimation that Picard might actually be innocent, just that his crime doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the war.) Fortunately for Bonet, whose job depends on it, he's able to find Picard fairly quickly, Picard having been ratted out. Bonet starts to bring Picard back to Paris, and they all lived happily ever after, except of course for Picard who's supposed to be beheaded.
Well, naturally that's not how it happens, since Picard is recaptured fairly early in the movie. What does happen is that, with the war on, Bonet and Picard's journey back to Paris is delayed thanks to sabotage from the Underground. They've bombed a bridge in a rural area of France, and Bonet and Picard are forced to stay in a small town while a way around the detour is worked out.
This gives Picard a chance to change his fate. The Nazis haven't been able to find the saboteurs, so they do what Nazis are always depicted as doing -- and to be fair, they did it for real after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich: they announce that if the saboteurs aren't ratted out, they'll round up a hundred innocent men and kill them. Picard decides to see if he can get Bonet to agree to the idea that Picard turn himself in as the saboteur, instead of as the real murderer Picard. After all, since Picard would die in either case, it doesn't have to matter to Bonet, who could claim Picard was shot dead trying to escape.
Bonet is skeptical, and for good reason. Any sane person would think that Picard was simply trying to come up with a way to delay the inevitable in the hopes that another avenue of escape might open up, and indeed, Picard does try again to escape. But there's also the personal and professional risk for Bonet: if Picard is found out as not being the real saboteur, how will that affect Bonet who will have perverted the course of justice? But Bonet does eventually go along with the idea.
Things get much more complicated, however. One is that Picard falls in love with a local girl, Marianne (Jean Sullivan). And then Bonet gets a bad cold that forces him into bed rest, preventing him from the travel that might be necessary to keep Picard around and to deliver Picard to the Germans as the saboteur.
Uncertain Glory is another of those movies with an interesting premise, but a movie that has a whole lot of reasons why it can never truly become great. Part of it is the Production Code. Since Picard is a real murderer, and not a combatant in the war, he technically has to pay for his crime, so there's pretty much only two options: Picard gets guillotined as the murderer, or he goes through with admitting he's the saboteur so that he can pay with his life for that murder. Also, Warner Bros. doesn't seem to have given this movie as much attention as some of their others. It's not a straight-up programmer, but it's also not to the level of a prestige film or even an A-list movie. There's a sense that the leads here are doing this movie to get through it and be able to start on the next movie. And, of course, the movie having been released in 1944, there has to be an undercurrent of propraganda. No morally ambiguous characters among the Nazis or the Underground here.
Still, Flynn gives a good performance in an otherwise uneven movie, and as a time capsule from World War II, it's definitely worth a watch.
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