The Guns of Navarone: it’s all about the cast

Of all the UK or US films made using events that took place in Greece during the World War II, films such as The Angry Hills, They Who Dare and Ill Met by Moonlight, set respectively during the fall of Athens, the Battle of the Dodecanese and the occupation of Crete, the most commercially successful and perhaps the best known is The Guns of Navarone (1961).

The film is based on the best-selling eponymous 1957 novel by Scottish writer, Alistair MacClean and even though Navarone is a fictional island the backdrop to the narrative – the Allied (British and Greek) special forces attempt to disrupt German domination of the Aegean – is real enough, even if the film’s attempt to suggest the outcome of the Battle of the Dodecanese was an Allied victory is wide of the mark.

The truth is that the British – against American advice, who felt Britain was getting distracted by another one of Churchill’s Eastern Mediterranean whims – having occupied the Dodecanese after the September 1943 Armistice of Cassibile and the surrender of Italian forces in Greece – were humiliatingly dislodged by a counter-attack from the Germans who remained in command of the islands until the end of the war.

Whereas in Ill Met by Moonlight and They Who Dare, the lead character – both times played by Dirk Bogarde – is miscast, and the same can be said of Robert Mitchum in The Angry Hills, what distinguishes The Guns of Navarone – apart from the well-plotted script by Carl Foreman – is how well cast it is.

Gregory Peck is entirely believable as the single-minded and ruthless Captain Keith Mallory, the leader of the mission, while Anthony Quinn does well as the tough but wily Colonel Andreas Stavrou, while Irene Papas is good as Maria Papadimos, the feisty Greek resistance fighter.

Interestingly, the renowned Greek opera singer Maria Callas was first signed up to play Irene Papas’ role, but she pulled out and her film career stalled, making her sole film appearance eight years later in Pier Paulo Pasolini’s Medea (1969), in which Callas played the Colchian princess, who revenges herself on her duplicitous husband, Jason, by murdering their children.

The Guns of Navarone was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who had a long but indifferent film career both in the UK and in Hollywood. Ice Cold in Alex and the original Cape Fear – an inferior remake was made by Martin Scorsese in 1991 – remain his best known films after The Guns of Navarone.

Anthony Quinn described working with Thompson as follows.

‘[He] read a scene until he had to shoot it and approached each shot on a whim. And yet the cumulative effect was astonishing. Lee Thompson made a marvelous picture but how? Perhaps his inventiveness lay in defying convention, in rejecting the accepted methods of motion picture making and establishing his own. Perhaps it was in his very formlessness that he found the one form he could sustain, and nurture, the one form that could, in turn, sustain and nurture him. Perhaps he was just a lucky Englishman who pulled a good picture out of his ass.’

They Who Dare: a heist film gone wrong

Here’s a classic heist movie scenario: a group of disparate men, from varying backgrounds, at different stages of their careers, with complex personal motives, are brought together by a determined, perhaps monomaniacal, leader, whose dedication to the mission he’s devised is challenged by having to keep those under his command in check and focussed on the purpose.

The gang starts off in good spirits, convinced that the job will succeed and they’ll all come out of it alive and well. But once they get going, all sorts of obstacles present themselves, the men argue and fall out among each other as their fears and weaknesses are exposed. The job, in a fashion, is completed, although some of the men are killed or captured in the process. Now, comes the second act: the getaway or the getaway as you are hunted down. The gang becomes increasingly desperate and relations among the surviving members become taut as capture or death seems imminent. Finally, you are caught or killed, though perhaps the strongest morally or physically will survive, albeit traumatised, empty, spiritually destroyed.

I say this is a regular plot for a heist film, but it also applies to They Who Dare, a Second World War movie made in 1954, which purports to tell the true story of the joint Greek commando and British Special Boat Section raid on Axis airfields on Rhodes in 1943.

Operation Anglo, as it was known, was led by Captain David Sutherland and its aim was to undermine Axis air dominance of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. In the film, Sutherland is played by Dirk Bogarde, himself a veteran of World War II, a British Army officer, whose experiences – particularly as a liberator of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – left him with a lifelong loathing of Germans.

Lewis Milestone, a legend of Hollywood, who made what is regarded by many as the greatest war film of all time – All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) – directed the film.

Yet, despite the auguries all being good, the film is a terrible disappointment and failure. Both Milestone and Bogarde hated the script when it was presented to them and Bogarde says he only agreed to do the movie for the opportunity to work with Milestone, forced out of American because of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and who Bogarde trusted to fix the script.

But the script couldn’t be fixed and Milestone’s attempts to give the film the All Quiet on the Western Front treatment by turning it into an anti-war film, traducing the motives of the Bogarde/Sutherland character and the usefulness of the mission, especially when it was known that the Germans were prone to exact brutal reprisals against the Greek civilian population for acts of resistance or sabotage, are unconvincing.

The film’s portrait of the Greek fighters and guides on the mission with the British commandos is also problematic. Despite Sutherland in his memoir – He Who Dared – heaping praise on the Greeks who he served alongside or aided the British in their operations in the Eastern Mediterranean – ‘They guided us, they fed us, they sheltered us and they died for us. No one in the SBS will ever forget this’ – the film has them as feeble-minded, over-emotional and more of a hindrance than a help to the mission.

Regarding the disappointing outcome of the film and the poor reception it received from critics and audiences – the press dubbed the film How Dare They – this is what Bogarde had to say in his memoir, Snakes and Ladders:

‘He [Milestone] made a cut of his version of the film and flew off to America; the producer made his cut and between the two of them we were a catastrophe. But it had been great fun and marvellous experience. And Millie taught me one of the greatest lessons to be learned in the cinema. “You can make a good script bad; but you can’t ever make a bad script good. Never forget that.” I was to be constantly reminded of his words for years to come. It is a lesson very few have bothered to remember.’

The Angry Hills: a story of what could have been

You’d be entitled to expect a lot from the World War Two drama, The Angry Hills (1959). It has all the ingredients to have been a memorable film. (See the film here).

It was written by A.I. Bezzerides, responsible for two classic crime novels, Thieves Market (1949) and They Drive by Night (1938), as well as the screenplays for film noir masterpieces such as On Dangerous Ground ((1952) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the latter, an adaptation of a Micky Spillane novel, directed by Robert Aldrich, who was also behind the camera for The Angry Hills.

Indeed, when one considers films Aldrich was responsible for throughout his career – Apache (1954), Vera Cruz (1954), The Big Knife (1955), 4 for Texas (1963), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Hustle (1975) – then we know that The Angry Hills was in the hands of one of the most capable and interesting American film-makers.

Add to this, the fact that the hero in The Angry Hills was played by Robert Mitchum – one of the biggest post-war Hollywood stars and perhaps the greatest male protagonist in film noir – Undercurrent (1946), Crossfire (1947), Out of the Past (1947) and The Big Steal (1949), and that his nemesis in the film was one of the best British actors of the 1950s and 1960s, Stanley Baker, then it’s even more perplexing that the film turned out to be so underwhelming.

The Angry Hills is set in Greece at the time of the Nazi invasion (1941) and involves Mitchum as an American journalist in possession of sensitive information trying, with the help of the Greek resistance, to escape the clutches of the Germans.

The film is messy and too interested in moving things along to get underneath the skin of its troubled protagonists. Bezzerides’ script wants to say something important about big themes – loyalty, betrayal, courage, duty, love – and is not squeamish about the barbarity of the German occupation, but Aldrich seems in a rush to unfold the plot and in the process loses what would have made this a good film, which is the human drama.

The Angry Hills could have and should have been in the mould of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City – which is also about the Gestapo hunting for resistance fighters and doesn’t shy from presenting German violence – but settles for less, the path of least difficulty, the lowest common denominator, i.e. the perennial problem facing the ambitious Hollywood film.

Aldrich admitted his failure, expressing his disappointment ‘not because it's not a good picture but because it could have been better. It had a potential that was never remotely realised... you feel sad about The Angry Hills... I'd know how to make The Angry Hills better in a thousand ways.’

Still, there are several interesting scenes – particularly, the village massacre – and the dialogue is good: at one point the Gestapo chief played by Baker tries to persuade a Greek resistance leader to hand over Mitchum by heaping derision on the American for not being a soldier, but a ‘journalist, a foreign correspondent. Do you know, Leonidas, what a foreign correspondent is? It is that brand of intellectual coward who observes while others die in order to publish his own version of events in a manner that will sell newspapers. This is the man you’ve been sheltering.’

Ill Met by Moonlight: is it about Cyprus?

Powell and Pressburger’s Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) tells the story of the celebrated kidnapping by British SOE officers and Cretan resistance fighters of General Heinrich Kreipe in Nazi-occupied Crete in 1944. 

Ill Met by Moonlight has many faults and Michael Powell – the greatest British film-maker, who, along with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger made a string of brilliant films, often on Second World War themes, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 49th Parallel, A Matter of Life and Death, The Battle of the River Plate – in the second volume of his autobiography Million Dollar Movie describes the film as ‘bad’ and ‘our greatest failure’.

Powell berates the script, the casting – he thought Dirk Bogarde ‘a picture-postcard hero in fancy dress’, far too whimsical to play Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor (though, apparently, Leigh-Fermor liked Bogarde’s depiction of him as a latter-day Lord Byron) – the absence of women in the film, the location (he couldn’t shoot in Crete or Cyprus so ended up having to make the film on the French-Italian frontier), the decision to shoot in black and white rather than colour, his own direction, and laments the outcome which, he says, was like a Ministry of Information documentary rather than a piece of entertainment.

‘Nobody was cultivating what my friend Robert De Niro describes as an “attitude”. The script was underwritten and weak on action, the gags were unoriginal, and the surprises not surprising… The direction concentrated so much on creating a Greek atmosphere that the director had no time, or invention, for anything else. The performances of the principals were atrocious. Marius Goring as General Kreipe wouldn’t have scared a rabbit; David Oxley as Captain Stanley Moss was the rabbit; while as for Dirk Bogarde’s performance as Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor, it’s a wonder that Paddy didn’t sue both Dirk and me.’

Still, Powell says, he was pleased that he managed to convey the patriotism, bravery, fierceness and fidelity of the Cretan rebels. It’s a fair enough point – even if at times the film does patronise the Cretans and they can come across as a little childish and overly susceptible to their emotions.

The way the British like to portray themselves in war films of this period is also interesting and is perhaps why the elegant Bogarde is such a mainstay in them. In Ill Met by Moonlight, Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss are shown as unfailingly gracious, brave without being foolhardy, restrained, cool, calm, understated, self-deprecating, eccentric, humorous in the face of adversity, humane, cunning – all qualities lacking in the rigid, overbearing, brutal, bombastic, boastful Germans. A great deal is made in the film that even though Moss and Leigh-Fermor are officers in the elite special services SOE, they are essentially amateurs, men who joined up to serve from ordinary life, without pretensions to be professional soldiers, in love with glory and conflict.

It’s also quite odd to note that the film was made in 1957 at the height of the EOKA struggle in Cyprus to end British colonial rule and unite the island with Greece. The conflict in Cyprus is why the film could not be made in Cyprus or Crete, much to Powell’s disappointment. The film makes clear what the Cretans are heroically fighting for – to rid themselves of foreign occupation – and either Powell and Pressburger were completely oblivious that they were, in fact, making a good argument on behalf of the Cypriots and against Britain’s occupation of the island or they were quite conscious of the metaphor they were putting forward: of a Greek island, straining under the yoke of foreign rule, and the patriotic locals taking to the mountains to shake it off.

As a film, as a work of art and entertainment, Ill Met by Moonlight is flawed, but it was a success at the box office and you have to wonder if the depiction of Greeks fighting for their freedom against foreign occupation was lost on the British audience. No doubt, they would’ve balked at any suggestion that the British occupation of Cyprus smacked of the Nazi occupation of Crete. Certainly, the British public had no sympathy for Cypriots taking up arms against Britain, attacking their soldiers with guns and bombs. Nor would we expect such understanding. Invariably, the general public will support their boys, no matter the virtues of the cause they’re fighting for or against.

Born to Kill: lurid but likeable

Born to Kill (1947) is one of the most controversial films ever made. Dismissed, despised, banned, held responsible for corrupting public morals and even used in the defence of a murderer, who held that he was spurred on to commit his crime after watching the film, Robert Wise’s lurid film noir, even with less squeamish contemporary sensibilities, still has the ability to shock with its issues of depraved lust, casual violence, extreme selfishness, alcoholism, greed, uncontainable resentment and hatred.

Lawrence Tierney plays a psychopath who also happens to be irresistible to women, which enables him to ingratiate himself into the love life of wealthy San Francisco socialite Helen Brent (played by Claire Trevor) and her step-sister Georgia Staples (played by Audrey Long) and it is his character – Sam Wilde – who we presume is the person ‘born to kill’ of the film’s title.

However, the novel by James Gunn on which the film is based is called Deadlier than the Male and this should tell us that the story as originally imagined wasn’t about Sam Wilde but Helen Barnes and Georgia Staples and that Sam Wilde was just a cypher to explore the women’s turbulent inner lives and how this leads to them making catastrophic choices in the social world.

It’s a fault that the Sam Wilde character is supposed to carry the film. He’s not that interesting. Violent lunatics rarely are and, indeed, it’s difficult to imagine how this charmless, unpleasant and quite stupid man can still possess the animal magnetism to worm himself into so many lives, break their will power and warp their sense of right and wrong.

The film has a well-written script and is effectively directed by Robert Wise, who before this worked with Orson Welles as his editor on Citizen Kane and directed the Val Lewton-produced The Body Snatcher, though perhaps he’s best known for directing two musicals, West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965).

What really lifts Born to Kill are the characters of the private detective Albert Arnett (played by Walter Slezak), his client, Mrs Kraft (played by Esther Howard) – the neighbour of the young woman murdered by Wilde – and Sam Wilde’s loyal friend, Marty Waterman (played by Elisha Cook Jr.).

Slezak is particularly entertaining to watch. His Bible-quoting private detective is unctuous and avaricious and has nothing in common with the tough-guy members of his trade – Dashiel Hammet’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow, both moral crusaders out to assure right triumphs over wrong, regardless of the financial consequences, the personal dangers and harm that come their way.

Albert Arnett, on the other hand, has no such courage or convictions. He lives on the breadline and when he sees an opportunity to fleece his client he has no remorse, his motivation being to sell the information he has gathered through his investigation to the highest bidder. He has no consideration for justice or the restoration of order. He is not a seeker of truth nor an avenger, but a sleazy blackmailer.

Lawrence Tierney: the toughest man in Hollywood

 

The toughest, most remorseless, cold-hearted protagonist in film noir has to be Lawrence Tierney.

Apparently, in real life Tierney was just as hard, prone to losing his short temper, benders and bar room brawling that often ended with the Brooklyn-born actor on the wrong side of the law and in the clink.

Since acting and film is about make-believe, it’s difficult to know whether Tierney was being himself when playing all these thugs and heavies or fell victim to believing his on screen image and acting it out in real life. No matter. 

The Hoodlum (1951) is classic Tierney. In it, he plays Vincent Lubeck, who starts off his life of crime as an adolescent, gradually climbing – or going down – the ladder of lawlessness, his crimes becoming increasingly serious and his prison sentences increasingly long. 

Not that the punishment he has to endure turns him onto the straight and narrow. 

Rather, he comes to see himself as a victim of the system and is consumed by hatred of society, determined to revenge himself against it by repudiating its basic rules of hard work, family solidarity, deferred gratification, opting instead for the easy money that theft brings; showing contempt for the honest ways of his brother – the gas station owner who believes in the American Dream – seducing his earnest sibling’s fiancée; and wanting all his desires fulfilled and wanting them fulfilled right now. 

Tierney gives a similar sociopathic portrait of John Dillinger in another collaboration with director Max Nosseck in the eponymous gangster film, which purports to tell the story of the Great Depression bank robber, whose crimes – and the notoriety and popularity they earned him – contributed to the formation of the FBI and helped make the name of J. Edgar Hoover. 

The screenplay for Dillinger (1945) was written by Philip Yordan, whose career spanned everything from classic film noirs – House of Strangers, The Big Combo, Detective Story; to Westerns – The Man from Laramie, Day of the Outlaw, Broken Lance; and epics – 55 Days at Peking, The Fall of the Roman Empire, El Cid. 

The third film noir Tierney made with Nosseck was Kill or be Killed (1950), which is not only not set in the urban mean streets – it’s actually set in the Brazilian jungle – but it also has Tierney playing a more conventional hero, albeit a very tough, smart and proud one, who is framed for murder and sets out to find the real killers, on the way dealing with piranhas, poisonous snakes and the lethal husband of the woman he's fallen in love with. 

The Wrong Box: Carry On Robert Louis Stevenson

We’d be entitled to expect a lot from Bryan Forbes’ The Wrong Box given that, first, it’s based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic black comedy; and second the film is replete with the finest British comedy talent of the 1960s – Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Peter Sellars, Tony Hancock – plus some of the country’s most renowned actors of the time – Michael Caine, John Mills, Ralph Richardson (who steals the film with his performance as the ‘scholar extraordinaire’, the insufferable know-it-all Joseph Finsbury).

Yet, while the film is entertaining enough and quite funny at times, it never takes off and this is no doubt because this is the sixties and Forbes decided to interpret Stevenson’s novel not only as a satire about the British establishment – with digs at the army, the police, the empire, the class system and so on – but also a farce that takes aim at British morés, particularly those that relate to sexual repression.

While there is satire in Stevenson’s novel – Stevenson, the conservative, displays considerable snobbery for the working classes and their burgeoning class consciousness – there is little of the simpering sexual innuendo of the film and Forbes adds nothing to the story by putting it there, other than suggesting we are watching a more upscale Carry On romp.

Stevenson’s novel was well received at the time, with Rudyard Kipling saying that while reading the novel, he ‘laughed over it dementedly. That man [Stevenson] has only one lung but he makes you laugh with all your whole inside’; though the film was a flop on release, Michale Caine explaining this by suggesting: ‘The film shows us [British] exactly as the world sees us – as eccentric, charming and polite – but the British knew better that they were none of these things, and it embarrassed us.’

Death: a story of punk rock resurrection

It’s a perennial question: which was the first punk rock band? The Monks, The MC5, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols? Inducted recently into the illustrious fellowship of aggressive, alienated, in-your-face subversives is – following The MC5 and The Stooges out of Detroit – Death.

Death’s music was lost and forgotten for a long time, not regarded as having relevance to any rock and roll genre or moment – they were certainly never cited as an influence by any of the punk bands that did enjoy popularity, and this not out of oversight or mean-spiritedness but because no one had ever heard their music.

To all intents and purposes, Death was just another in a thousand bands that came close to having a rock and roll career, putting out a single here, an album there, but never catching on, some bands never having had sufficient talent or motivation, others quickly waylaid by the fast side of the business, while a small minority, like Death, falling to the curse of being ahead of its time.

In Death’s case, when they were trying to make their way in mid-70s Detroit, punk had yet to be identified, the belligerent commotion being made by three black guys – who saw their music coming out of Alice Cooper and The Who and had no notion that what they were playing would go on to become punk rock and they were in fact punk rockers, a term they would’ve found offensive – was met with indifference, bemusement and outright hostility. With nothing doing from the record industry, Death soldiered on for a while before rejection after rejection crushed their self-belief and the band petered out, dreams of living the rock life ending in withering failure, despair, addiction and illness.

The Hackney brothers dissolved their band in 1977 and settled for lives of obscurity, regret and, in the case of the band’s ideological force, David Hackney, alcoholism and an early death.

Until, of course, 30 years on, thanks to the fanatical, obsessive record collecting scene, punk aficionados were alerted to Death’s remarkable single Politicians in my Eyes. Soon enough, the unique quality and importance of the band, its unmistakable punk sound and attitude, was realised and master tapes of sessions recorded for a never-released album were unearthed. Death had been rediscovered or, more correctly, discovered, because they had never had any recognition or acclaim first time round.

The documentary film above – A Band Called Death – is the story of Death, their birth, death and resurrection, and what they lost on their way to finding the appreciation and kudos they deserved.

Charlton Heston: from Moses to Long John Silver

When you think of Charlton Heston, you’re likely to think of his roles in Ben Hur and El Cid, as Moses in The Ten Commandments, as Ramon Miguel Vargas in Touch of Evil, Major Matt Lewis in 55 Days at Peking, as General Charles Gordon in Khartoum, Major Amos Charles in Major Dundee and George Taylor in Planet of the Apes.

All these characters are incorruptible, out to right the world’s wrongs, save humanity, are moral to the point of sacredness or, if you prefer, annoyingly inflexible, self-righteous and superior to the point of self-abnegation and self-destruction.

In Major Dundee, Sam Peckinpah does try to thrust Heston and the Heston stereotype into situations where his morality and dutifulness are severely put to the test, offering him all the licentious delights that might break down his supercilious high-mindedness and make him more human; but the studios didn’t like what Peckinpah was up to and took the film away from him and cut it to preserve their image of Heston as pious hero.

There are instances in his career that Heston tried to break away from the stereotype. One is the Western Will Penny, another is the 1990 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Treasure Island, in which he plays Long John Silver. (See entire film here).

The buccaneer Silver is entirely corrupt, amoral, inspired by greed, a killer, a mutineer, a thoroughly disagreeable, incorrigible outlaw. We’re not even sure his willingness to betray his fellow pirates and protect young Jim Hawkins is genuine paternal instinct and not a cunning stratagem to eliminate rivals for John Flint’s loot or a base plan to save his own skin, realising that the mutiny he’s headed is doomed and that the gallows beckon unless he can convince Captain Smollett, Dr Livesey and Squire Trelawney that he’s redeemable. 

Heston’s characterisation of Long John Silver doesn’t succeed. Heston can’t get away from injecting the lowly criminal with a dose of nobility and amputating the ambiguity of his actions. More convincing in the film are Oliver Reed’s portrayal of Captain Billy Bones – who he hilariously plays as a rambunctious Glaswegian – and Christopher Lee’s creepy depiction of Blind Pugh, the angel of death, who palms the Black Spot – the sign of imminent death – to Billy Bones. 

We Live Again: Hollywood takes on Tolstoy and Russia’s turmoil

Rouben Mamoulian’s We Live Again (1934), based on Leo Tolstoy’s last full-length novel Resurrection (1899) – which many, including myself, like more than War and Peace and Anna Karenina – is a great film, stylishly and masterfully put together by the revered Armenian director, a pioneer of cinematic grammar, with some truly breathtaking scenes, especially the Orthodox Easter Service scene and the scene where Prince Dmitri desperately tries to communicate with the condemned Katusha amid the pandemonium of an overcrowded prison, all photographed by Greg Toland, the legendary cinematographer best known for his work on Citizen Kane.

Gyorgy Lukacs says of Dostoevsky and Lenin said of Tolstoy – who the Bolshevik loathed – that they ask the right questions, regarding the state of society, they make the right diagnoses – in Tolstoy’s case that the evils plaguing Russia, barely a generation after the abolition of serfdom, were engrained in a system of exaggerated inequality, exploitation and injustice and that radical measures to remedy the situation were needed to avoid catastrophe – which is what befell Russian in 1917 and for the next 70 years – but come up with the wrong solutions.

Anyone familiar with the 19th century Russian novel, which along with Homer, Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, represent the highest forms of literature, will know of the febrile social and political climate that form their backdrop. While Dostoevsky’s solution to Russia’s turmoil was nationalism, tradition, Orthodoxy, Tolstoy understood that social and particularly economic reform was necessary.

Thus, in We Live Again/Resurrection, Prince Dmitri, the landowning nobleman, embraces land redistribution – as did the blue-blooded Tolstoy, partly inspired by Georgism and partly by Christian ethics – and sinks his teeth into the corruption and inhumanity of the church, the judiciary and class system. It was Tolstoy’s reformist approach that irked Lenin, whose vision for Russia was much more drastic and, stripped of any Christian outlook, deranged.

Indeed, it would be wrong to see Resurrection as a political novel and the resurrection of the title doesn’t just refer to national renewal, but personal revival. Both Prince Dmitri and the woman he has wronged, the peasant girl Katusha, have entered a spiritual Hades, out of which Tolstoy wants to lead them. Resurrection, an escape from hell, from death, is the fundamental tenet of Orthodox Christianity, which is why Easter plays such a prominent part in the novel and film.

All these social and political themes in Tolstoy’s novel are, remarkably you might think, prevalent in Mamoulian’s film. The film is clear in its denunciation and mockery of the Russian caste system and openly sympathises with those characters that offer a socialist critique and alternative to it. We Live Again may be one of the very few Hollywood film that positively refers to and discusses socialism.

Again, however, We Live Again is not an explicitly political film; it is a classic Hollywood melodrama, conceived by Samuel Goldwyn as a star vehicle for Anna Sten, who he promoted as a new Garbo, while the censors at the Hays Office overlooked all its controversial political and sexual themes precisely because they regarded the drama of sin and redemption as a morally instructive and uplifting message for American audiences.