H/C Discovery

[przed]

Last night after I got Ros to bed, I sat down to indulge in some yummy homemade pumpkin pie before settling in to write the final paper for the (infuriatingly ill-organized) course I'm currently taking for work. I turned on the TV, flipped past TCM, and was promptly sucked into a WW II POW film from 1943, The Cross of Lorraine. The film is about French soldiers who are captured by the Germans in the early days of the war, and it stars Jean-Pierre Aumont (the only actual Frenchman in the film) and Gene Kelly as friends who try to survive the prison camp they're thrown into. It has hurt/comfort for the nation, and is more than a bit slashy.

This picture happens after Gene Kelly's Victor has been tortured for having a sassy mouth, and Aumont's Paul agrees to take a job he doesn't want interpreting for the Germans to get him out of the dungeon he's been thrown into. It is entirely indicative of the vibe of the entire film:


I know, right?

I basically spent the entire film wondering why I'd never heard of it and where it had been all my life.

Here, Paul tries to convince a completely broken Victor to make an escape attempt as the camp doctor looks on.


And this pic is from a scene near the end, when they've made their escape and been found by a young member of the resistance. I've always thought Kelly had a really interesting vulnerable masculinity about him, and in this film the vulnerability really comes out.


Here are a couple of beefcake!emo shots of the two stars:




Scruffy, uniformed Gene Kelly does something very funny to my insides.

And finally, here's what happens at the end, when Victor thinks his boyfriend Paul has been killed and he finally overcomes the trauma he's been through to take on the Germans who are trying to conscript men from the village where they've taken refuge.


Given that it was made during the war, it's a pretty interesting film. Aesthetically it's pretty gorgeous, with effective black and white cinematography. The German commandant of the military prison makes a point of telling the POWs that they're not in a concentration camp. And while most of the "French" soldiers, with the exception of Aumont, speak American-accented English, the Germans all speak untranslated German. (Peter Lorre has a key role as the German sergeant who tortures Victor.)

It's also got a bit of a goofy ending, though understandable given the times, with the French villagers turning on the Germans in their midst, killing them all, and then cheerfully burning down their own village and heading into the mountains to join the resistance.

Comments

[przed.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of it either, and it's a total find. Ninety minutes of hurt/comforty, slashy goodness. (I sooo wish there were a lot more modern Hollywood movies around the 90 minute mark. I just don't have the time or energy for many three hour epics any more, and that leaves off the fact that most movies really don't need to be three hours.)

[moonlightmead.livejournal.com]

It was on TV in the UK pretty much the same day you posted, had I but known! Wah!

[przed.livejournal.com]

Well, that's just not fair. :-(