Destiny's Passport

Another of the B movies that TCM ran in their spotlight to B movies back in the summer was Passport to Destiny. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

The movie was released in 1944, and the opening credits are superimposed over establishing shots of London, which pretty squarely puts the movie in World War II when the Nazis were trying to bomb London to oblivion. One morning on a bus, cleaning woman Ella Muggins (Elsa Lanchester) overhears a conversation about how the Nazis have just destroyed a long-time pub. Ella, who's a widow, talks about how she's survived so far thanks to her late husband (the photo used is Lanchester's real-life husband Charles Laughton), who served in India and brought back a "magic eye" charm. And then, while she's up in the attic storage, she actually finds the charm in an old trunk.

Not much later, there's another of the nightly bombing raids on London, and Ella gets caught in it. Except that she survives, because if she didn't there wouldn't be that much of a movie. She attributes her survival to the charm. In the bomb shelter in the Underground, she starts talking about the charm, and people have the idea to ask what would you do if you had a charmed life. This being the middle of World War II, one woman says that if she had such a charmed life, she'd go over to Germany and give Adolf Hitler what-for. Ella, naïve woman that she is, gets an idea....

It's only about one scene later that we see a boat that's about to leave London and join one of the convoys trying to cross the Atlantic, followed by a shot of Ella sneaking aboard the ship thinking it's going to Germany. When she's found out, the crew is none too happy, because female stowaways are decidedly bad luck. Sure enough, this being a B movie, it doesn't take more than one scene for the ship to get bombed and everyone to have to abandon ship. And wouldn't you know it, but charmed Ella is able to hide from the Germans while the rest of the crew become POWs.

So she decides to make her way to Berlin, posing as a deaf-mute so that nobody will figure out that the only language she knows is English and as such, is decidedly not German or even from one of the countries the Nazis conquered. She eventually stows away on a train bound for Berlin, getting away with it by pretending to be working on the train. The compartment where she is just happens to have as passengers two men who are both part of the resistance working against Hitler, so when he gets to Berlin she's going to be be able to find somebody who might be able to help her.

Her plan is to get to the Chancellery where Hitler's office should be, and get a job there with the intention of going into Hitler's office and killing him. Also working there is Lord Haw-Haw, although it seems as though his usefulness to the Nazis is coming to an end. All of the plot strands come together, but since this was made during the war, you have to think they can't really kill Hitler, can they?

It's easy to see why a movie like Passport to Destiny would go into production during the war, but it's got so many plot holes and other problems that the movie doesn't really succeed. And on top of that, Ella's play-dumb act gets increasingly annoying. So Passport to Destiny is a bit of an interesting curiosity from the war, but not a particularly good movie.