Though he's second billed in the credits, John Wayne doesn't make his appearance in the picture until about the forty two minute mark. I kept wondering how his character, Pat Talbot, managed to evade arrest and detainment in the story, seeing as how he just showed up with no credentials to show for it in case the Nazis started asking questions. Maybe that's the problem, Talbot was never really put on the spot as he squired Michele de la Becque (Joan Crawford) after she learned that her fiancé was a Nazi collaborator.Or was he? Seems Philip Dorn's character Robert Tortot, was assuming a dual role, sort of a double agent as it were without getting into the espionage racket. Even though this picture preceded "Casablanca" by a scant month or so, the parallels are obvious enough to make it look like this lesser known film might have been pulling off a cheap imitation. You had the French Resistance angle personified by Crawford's character, complete with 'exit papers' signed by the military governor of Paris, much like Ingrid Bergman's 'letters of transit'. Wayne is no Bogey of course, nor is Philip Dorn, though John Carradine takes a pretty good stab at Conrad Veidt's Major Strasser. And if you want to make a stretch of it, J. Edward Bromberg resembles a poor man's Claude Rains as a French policeman.I didn't have too much problem with all of this, except for Crawford's see-sawing relationship between her two leading men. At one point she excoriates Tortot with that quote above in my summary line, but still sidles up to him when it's to her advantage. For his part, Wayne managed to call her 'Mike' more than a couple times with no one raising an objection. I don't know how the French or Germans would have understood the translation.With Talbot whisked away aboard a rescue plane, the film closes on a firm, patriotic note, though I highly doubt that the pilot would have had the time or resources to sky write the word 'COURAGE' in the air above Paris. It ends the picture on a high note, but it seems to me a more likely outcome would have had a German plane knock it out of the sky.

Sliding down to the end of her MGM years (18 of them!), Joan Crawford got tossed into Hollywood's propaganda machine with this World War II drama about how the invasion of Paris changed the course of its history. Joan seems about as French as I do, speaking French (in English...) as if it were Cary Grant trying to imitate Chevalier or Boyer. Crawford's real-life soon to be husband Philip Dorn plays her French lover who ends up on the side of the Nazis, shocking the anti-Nazi Crawford. Future blacklistee Howard da Silva is ironically cast as one of the Nazi's. Many decades later, he would play MGM's boss Louis B. Mayer opposite Faye Dunaway's Joan Crawford in the notorious "Mommie Dearest". Since Martin Kosleck, Conrad Veidt and George Sanders were unavailable (their Nazi uniforms from other films obviously at the cleaners), John Carradine stepped in, his uniform from other similar films fresh and sparkling.An amusing scene in a fine French dress shop has the portly or otherwise plain German women being nasty or trying to fit into things two sizes too small for them. One of the more glamorous of them is played by the future Lovey Howell of "Gilligan's Island" fame, Natalie Schafer, who has a wonderfully bitchy scene demanding a coat in the shop that Crawford is utilizing to transfer money to the Allies in. John Wayne pops up towards the middle of the film as an American soldier Crawford helps, but Wayne fans will be disappointed by how little screen time he gets. There are all sorts of divided loyalties and counter espionage agents so it is sometimes hard to keep track of who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. MGM perennial Reginald Owen is also present in one of his several hundred films made there.While this will never be considered on par with "Casablanca" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls" as a classic example of the golden age of Hollywood's propaganda machine, it is amusing. Particularly funny is a short sequence of a black singer singing "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You" to oblivious Germans, smiling stupidly as he insults them and their fuhrer. A montage of Joan walking through Paris after the Nazi's have invaded seems silly, especially since it is obvious that she is going the opposite way than anybody else.

Interesting film with Joan Crawford caught up in occupied France during World War 11.A young dashing John Wayne is terribly miscast as a flier in this film.Phil Dorn, who was memorable 6 years later in "I Remember Mama," plays Crawford's love interest here. The two of them spend the film deceiving the Nazis.Albert Basserman plays an entirely too sympathetic Nazi official in the film. He must have thought that he was still starring in his Oscar nominated 1940 supporting performance in "Foreign Correspondent."Of course, Ms. Crawford goes from clothes-horse to extreme patriot and remains in the arms of Dorn, both despised by the occupants for their supposedly pro-Nazi ways. How they fooled the public. Vive la France!

Joan Crawford is OK as a disillusioned and confused french Mademoiselle coming to grips with the German occupation of France in WWII. The movie is everywhere - downed pilots, civilian collaboration with the Nazis and love. Joan falls for a couple of guys...a Frenchman and a downed RAF pilot (John Wayne - on screen for only about half of the movie and unfortunately miscast). He tries to disguise himself as a college student with Joan's help. Too much of the movie is about German carpetbaggers shopping for high fashion and looting the Louvre of French art treasures. If the movie had focused on Joan and her travails, it would have been better.