LGM Film Club, Part 190: Commandos Strike at Dawn

Most of my familiarity with Paul Muni is with Scarface, in which he does a great job and uses an accent that was far more immigrant-English focused that anything else out of Hollywood, which I’ve always found impressive. But I don’t know his career much beyond this. So I watched the 1942 film Commandos Strike at Dawn, which is a World War II flick about Norwegian resistance to the Nazis. Muni plays the leader of the Norwegian resistance, a mild mannered but respected community member forced to act in order to save his people. In this, Muni’s accent is not so much Norwegian as sounding exactly like James Mason would speak in films. Not sure if this was his natural voice or not. Anyway, the film is….OK. Directed by John Farrow and even having a late role for Lillian Gish, as you can see in the above image, the problem with a movie like this is that you have to establish the happy community in the first half hour, which means a lot of boring scenes around a wedding or party or something to introduce the characters before the bad guys come. The fight scenes are alright, but nothing overly special. It’s a fairly mediocre film. But I always find the World War II films made during World War II quite interesting. Imagine we invaded Iraq and in 2003 and Hollywood immediately followed with 100 films about the righteousness of the cause. It’s unimaginable. Anyway, here’s the trailer: