By Jennifer Baldwin. Which is the higher value: Peace or Freedom? Can there be true peace without freedom? Is freedom worth dying for? Is freedom worth killing for? What are we willing to do for our freedom – not just the soldiers, sailors, and marines—but all of us, what are we willing to do?
Few movies today wrestle with these questions, probably because they’ll bring up answers that the Hollywood establishment doesn’t want to face. The independent films we champion here at LFM are different, of course. They’re not afraid to face the issue of freedom. Freedom-loving films are out there; they’re just not the mainstream movies that garner all the press.
But that wasn’t always the case. As any movie fan with a passing knowledge of Hollywood in the 1940s knows, movies about freedom and fighting tyranny were turned out half a dozen a week back in those days, all in service to the war effort and the fight against the Nazis and Imperial Japan.
Edge of Darkness is one such movie. It has a message about freedom that is essential, even for us today, in understanding the sacrifices and requirements necessary for liberty. It also has lots of guns.
Edge of Darkness is a great film if you like the following things: Piles of dead Nazis; a religious minister mowing down Germans from a bell tower; and Ann Sheridan toting a big, honking machine gun. And boy, does she tote it!
This is a movie about the importance of firearms. I can’t recall the last movie I watched that showed just how much having freedom depends on having guns. Everybody is packing in this one – from the little old ladies, to gray-haired doctor Walter Houston, to the town preacher.
Needless to say, Errol Flynn handles a gun, but it’s Ann Sheridan striking a pose for firearms and freedom that really gets the film going.
These are the pleasures of Edge of Darkness. It’s a relatively unknown gem only recently released on DVD. It’s director is the underrated Lewis Milestone, director of one of my favorite films noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Milestone was no stranger to war movies, either, having directed All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930.
Edge of Darkness starts at the end, where we see the aftermath of a great slaughter in a small Norwegian fishing village. The Nazis find the Norwegian flag flying over their garrison in town.
When they go to investigate, they find the village piled high with bodies. Director Milestone doesn’t go for nuance here. It’s bodies.
And more bodies.
And more bodies.
And more bodies.
And more bodies.
And, yes, more bodies.
It’s a relentless little sequence that not only sets up the somber tone of the film, but establishes a couple of key questions: Who are the people capable of such an act of violence? What does it take for a quiet town of fishermen and cannery workers to revolt and render such carnage?
Obviously, we know the Norwegians have fought back and won, thanks to the flag flying over the village. We know they did it, and it’s not hard to guess why: the Nazis were occupying their town. This is a WWII propaganda film, so of course the townspeople are going to fight back against the wicked Nazis.
But those are easy, pat answers. The power of the film comes from showing the dilemmas and costs associated with the fight for freedom. It shows how easy it would be to appease and live in “peace” and how hard it is to take up arms and kill and die for liberty. Some people will die. Some will have to kill. Some will suffer brutal beatings and hard labor and even rape. Liberty will demand sacrifice and bloodshed.
That’s why the opening sequence is key. Milestone doesn’t flinch from showing the carnage. It’s not to condemn the villagers, but to show that freedom isn’t easy, that it’s not just some nice idea we can comfort ourselves with, but also a very real thing that must be bought and paid for in blood. The actions of the villagers, which the film relates to us in flashback, are justified. They are not taken lightly. The results are grim, but they are shown to be necessary. The cost of freedom is high, but the film does not condemn the cost.
In a nifty bit of scripting from screenwriter Robert Rossen, we meet the main characters and key figures in the underground resistance right away.
We meet Walter Huston, the town doctor – and Ruth Gordon, his innocent, flighty wife.
They just want peace, and so they acquiesce to the German occupation. So too does the town minister, who thinks fighting back against the Nazis is wrong. He calls armed resistance “murder.”
But Ann Sheridan, Walter Huston’s hard-as-steel daughter, is a member of the underground resistance.
And Errol Flynn is a local fisherman and leader of the movement.
The supporting cast is excellent, including Judith Anderson’s bitter hotel owner and Roman Bohnen’s dimwitted but eager-to-fight-back shopkeeper.
We also meet two collaborators: a Polish actress (played by Nancy Coleman) who has taken up with the Nazi commander (Helmut Dantine) in order to avoid life in a work camp; and Ann Sheridan’s brother, Johan (John Beal), a quisling who turned on his fellow countrymen while studying in Oslo.
Though Flynn and Sheridan star in the film, it’s much more an ensemble piece than the typical star vehicle. Part of this is probably due to Flynn’s legal troubles at the time of shooting (he was facing a statutory rape charge), but the ensemble nature of the movie also works in service to its main theme: that liberty is not just an individual struggle, but also a communal struggle.
We see this most strikingly in the sequence where the town schoolmaster defies the Nazis. He is just one man, a brave, quiet philosopher. He takes a stand and his punishment at the hands of the Nazis stirs the town.
One man can make a stand for freedom – he can even change people’s minds, as the schoolmaster’s sacrifice does for those who had previously called for “peace” and appeasement – but one man alone cannot win everybody’s freedom. We all must take a hand.
And so the villagers do – in fierce, defiant fashion.
They get out their guns.
And work together for their freedom.
Typically, this notion of communal struggle is cited as an example of Rossen’s left wing politics. But this isn’t really a left wing idea. There’s nothing about individualism that says that people shouldn’t work together to fight for their freedom. In fact, the more people who stand up and fight together, the better it is for the cause of freedom. A few individuals can try to do it by themselves, but if we don’t openly support them, they will just be a small trickle against a wave of oppression. We can only push back against the wave if enough people are willing to make the sacrifice for freedom. That’s as timely a message now as it was then.
We must all take a stand in order to secure our liberty. That is the message of Edge of Darkness. It might seem absurd to viewers today, watching a film in which a religious minister and a bunch of old ladies open fire on the enemy from their upstairs windows.
That sort of thing only happens in an ironic way now, like something in a Quentin Tarantino film or an Edgar Wright spoof. But that’s just the point. Why should we find it absurd watching ordinary people fighting for their freedom? It shouldn’t be.
Frankly, it should be rousing. I was certainly cheering the final scenes of Edge of Darkness. Patriots are made, quislings and collaborators are repentant, free people defy their oppressors, and a lot of Nazis get blowed up and shot down for good. If I let out a laugh when some old lady sticks a rifle out of her window and looks to shoot up a few stinking Nazis, it’s only because I can’t quite believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing. The cost is high. The death and carnage caused by the villagers is not taken lightly. But the film makes it clear: Liberty must sometimes be purchased in blood. It’s a heavy purchase, but it’s worth it. And we all have a stake in it.
Also: Ann Sheridan with a gun. I have mentioned that, right?
Edge of Darkness isn’t a masterpiece; it’s just another solid, well-directed war movie from Warner Brothers in the 1940s. But it’s remarkable because its message still has meaning for us today … because the fight for freedom is always relevant, in all times.
Posted on August 16th, 2010 at 7:37am.
Wow, great piece and great visual essay. Your photos really convey the film even though I haven’t seen it. I’s amazing how un-PC those old Warner Bros. films were, and how everybody understood at the time that this was what was necessary to beat the Nazis. Too bad Hollywood has lost its nerve since then and can’t do the same with the Commies/Islamo-fascists.
Thanks for reading my piece, Veeki. I’m glad you enjoyed the photos. I still get a chuckle out of the minister mowing down Nazis with a machine gun. 😀
It’s not just that Hollywood has lost its nerve; I honestly believe most filmmakers in Hollywood today aren’t even capable of making movies that are so morally clear-cut and freedom-loving as Edge of Darkness. Hollywood — like almost all of our pop culture — worships at the alter of relativism. A film where the main characters would fight patriotically, righteously, and unabashedly against radical Islam just isn’t even on their radar. It does not compute.
Today’s Hollywood lacks moral earnestness. Everything is wrapped in layers of irony or filled with self-doubting characters; they cannot sincerely champion virtue because they don’t believe in it anymore.
Having said that, I still have hope. As the Boomers grow old and shake off this mortal coil, perhaps the Gen Xers and Gen Yers can bring back Hollywood from the morass of moral relativism it’s been stuck in. I know I get a lot more out of these old WB wartime flicks than I do any war movies made in the last ten years and I hope others of my generation might be the same.
Nice piece, and I agree with your interpretation.
Of course, a lot of kids growing up in the 50s also saw such movies on TV and came away with a different notion. Namely that large militarily powerful countries like say, the US, shouldn’t be invading small weak countries, like Vietnam. Of course, that interpretation throws away a lot of nuance, but then nuance, as you point out, isn’t a big part of the WW2 propaganda movies that we grew up on. Strong beating up weak and the weak fighting back is a strong narrative.
If the movie had been a historical piece, for example, the narrative may have been a bit more muddled. It might be pointed out, for example, that Churchill and the French first violated Norwegian neutrality by landing a garrison and naval forces there with the aim to tempt Germany into attacking and thereby relieving the pressure on France. So the poor Norgies in that fishing villiage owe the Allies as much for their pain as the Axis. It can be argued, of course, that Germany would have invaded anyway for the iron ore and sub bases, but we’ll never know for sure.
I bow to your superior knowledge of WWII history, K. Thanks for the background info; I didn’t know that about the Allies tempting the Germans to attack Norway. Adds an interesting wrinkle to the story.
And yeah, resistance movement stories are often twisted into anti-American parables by leftists. It annoys me to no end, because what these “anti-imperialists” always miss is that the Nazis were evil and America is not. End of comparison, full stop.
What I liked about Edge of Darkness were the meditations on the nature of freedom and the responsibility we all have for our own liberty. The Norwegians couldn’t depend on the British to come save them (well, except for giving them guns, heh); they had to fight back on their own. That’s a message we need to be reminded of, both in war and peace time.