So Ends Our Night

TCM's daytime lineup for tomorrow is a bunch of movies starring Margaret Sullavan. One of them is a movie that was new to me when I first saw it on the TCM schedule a few weeks back: So Ends Our Night. I recorded it then because it sounded interesting, and since it's on the schedule for tomorrow at 5:45 PM, I decided to sit down and watch it to be able to do a review on it here.

Sullavan isn't the star here; that honor goes to Fredric March although the movie is somewhat more of an ensemble cast. March plays Josef Steiner, a dissident in Nazi Germany who's been forced to flee the country, leaving behind a wife Marie (Frances Dee in a tiny role), and leaving behind his passport. This means that Steiner is a refugee, and like many of the other refugees from Nazi Germany, unable to obtain work or legal permission to stay in whatever country he's fled to.

Steiner isn't the only one in this predicament; there are lots of Jews like Ludwig Kern (Glenn Ford in an early role) who at the start of the movie are in detention for having been picked up as illegal aliens. Sometimes they can get temporary work permits; sometimes they work under the table; but eventually they're found out and picked up by the police, being placed in detention until they can be deported into another country for the process to be repeated all over again. Nobody wanted them as refugees, in part because they were all recovering from the depression and had trouble creating enough work for the people who were born citizens of their countries.

It's around the end of 1937, a few months before the Anschluss in which Nazi Germany absorbed Austria, and Kern and Steiner have both been thrown out of Czechoslovakia into Austria. Steiner, only being a dissident, has a slightly easier time getting a false passport. Kern meets chemistry student Ruth Holland (that's Margaret Sullavan), who like Kern is Jewish and has fled Germany, studying chemistry where and when she can under a professor who himself is a fellow refugee.

Ludwig and Ruth are eventually found out and forced to leave Austria, this time heading for Switzerland, where they're able to hide for some time, although they're trying to make it to France since rumor has it that it's easier to get work permits there than in other European countries. (Obviously they wouldn't have known that the Nazis were going to overrun France in two years' time.) They do get to France, only to find out that it's not that much easier in France than anywhere else they've been. Steiner also makes it to France, which is where he gets a letter informing him that his wife is terminally ill back in Germany.

So Ends Our Night is another of those movies with an interesting premise. I mentioned quite a few years ago how Hollywood was for a long time unwilling to take on the issue of Nazi Germany's human rights problems, since Germany was still a big market for them. There was also the issue that a lot of Americans were still weary of the Great War and didn't want to get involved in another European war. Indeed, in the second half of 1941, Congress started hearings on the subject of those Hollywood movies that did dare to call out the Nazis, although of course those hearings would go by the wayside once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Most of the other movies that did deal with Nazi Germany either had westerners getting caught up in the country, or Nazi spies in America. Even The Mortal Storm didn't mention Jews.

So Ends Our Night is more unflinching, although it's in some ways unrelentingly grim, in that we get it after the second or third time the characters are forced back into hiding. The ending also seems unrealistically upbeat. But the main characters all give good performances, and as a look at how Hollywood tried to be daring before actually going to war with Germany, it's a movie that's absolutely worth a watch.

One note, however, and that's that the print TCM showed a few weeks back wasn't in the best of shape, being slightly wavy, almost as though whatever source material had been used for the transfer wasn't quite flat. It's not jumpy, but the scenes do have a sort of uncomfortable sway to them.