Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943)

Hostages

Hostages (1943) which I screened from a brand new 35mm print in Bologna in August 2020 remains one of my favourite WWII resistance films. Below, programme notes written for the Cinema Ritrovato screening. — EK

One of the most sobering wartime films made in Hollywood about the atrocities in Europe, this is also one of Tuttle’s greatest. Written by Lester Cole, soon to be blacklisted, the film’s historical perspective and visionary nature matches that of Cole’s other great achievement from the following year, None Shall Escape. William Bendix, in one of his finest screen roles, plays a restaurant waiter in 1943 Prague; considered an idiot, he is in fact a resistance leader. His workplace is frequented by Nazi officers and when a homesick officer kills himself, the Gestapo calls it a murder and vows retaliation. Random citizens are picked for execution, including the resistance leader and a collaborator. While the initial death is considered a murder, the film ends with a Nazi passing off the murder of another officer as suicide. 

Based on a novel by Stefan Heym

Nazi occupation is seen as a continuously futile and suicidal act. This is not a propaganda film by any stretch, but rather a film about propaganda. William Randolph Hearst’s “Los Angeles Herald Express” disagreed and cried Red: “plain Communism masquerading under the guise of Czech patriotism”. Cole must have worn this as a badge of honour. The location footage was originally shot some six years earlier for Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife by Ernst Lubitsch who, in 1942, had made his own Nazi occupation film, To Be or Not to Be. Paul Lukas, fresh from Watch on the Rhine, plays Rheinhardt, a role originally meant for Erich von Stroheim (who instead appeared in Five Graves to Cairo). It was a time of urgent creativity in the production of war films focusing on the moral complexities of war. Tuttle shows fascism as unprincipled and unfaithful to humanity or truth, he keeps the tone pensive and eerily quiet, the air charged with oppression. Between silence (a female prisoner silently crying) and whispering (the way the Czechs talk) there’s the deafening sound of a machine gun. But even under fire, the Czechs in the film fall without a sound.

HOSTAGES
Directed by Frank Tuttle
Screenplay by Lester Cole, Frank Butler Based on Hostages (novel) by Stefan Heym
William Bendix (Janoschek/ Karel Vokosch), Luise Rainer (Milada Pressinger), Arturo de Cordova (Paul Breda), Paul Lukas (Rheinhardt), Katina Paxinou (Maria), Oskar Homolka (Lev Pressinger), Reinhold Schünzel (Kurt Daluege), Frederick Giermann (Capt. Patzer).
Music by Victor Young
Cinematography Victor Milner
Edited by Archie Marshek
Produced by Sol C. Siegel | Paramount Pictures
August 12, 1943 (United States) | 88 minutes