Veronica Lake was huge star in her time, though seemingly not highly regarded by critics today. One thing for certain is she was greatly disliked by many of her peers at the time, with Joel McCrea dubbing her “Moronica Lake”. I always thought she was good in the film noirs I had seen her in, and she is a perfect femme fatale with that trademark peek-a-boo haircut.
It turns out that coiffure might have been roughly 90% of her allure, as she is quite awful in 1944’s The Hour Before the Dawn. It can’t be a coincidence her air is pulled up over her head in this picture, styled like those fancy European loaves decorated with what look like complicated braids. I wonder if that was all the rage in Switzerland, where her character is supposed to be from.
I wasn’t sure of the capacity in which she serves in a British mansion, whether it is as housekeeper or nanny to the kids. At least, she doesn’t interact with the kids much, which is probably just as well, as she is a Nazi spy trying to get them blown to bits in nightly air raids.
The members of that family include John Sutton, his wife (Binnie Barns) and son (David Leland). Sutton’s brother is Franchot Tone, who is a lifelong pacifist after accidentally killing the family dog during target practice back when he was a kid.
Now England has entered WWII and, with that, Sutton becomes a high-ranking official while Tone successfully seeks exemption from military service as a conscientious objector. This makes him a public pariah, as people do things like mail white feathers to him anonymously, presumably ones plucked from chickens. He even has trouble finding court-mandated employment at nearby farms until he helps one owner by nearly knocking out a belligerent worker. This is a weird, rare breed: the fightin’ pacifist, who thinks with his fists.
Tone is even unpopular in his own household, but his dad (Henry Stephenson) won’t allow anybody in the house to say anything bad about his son. I like to think everybody, including Stepheson, took that command literally, and has to keep taking a single step outside the front door to let loose with loud, long, profane tirades against the family’s dissenting voice.
But Tone finds a sympathetic ear in Lake, and her behavior suggests other body parts might be available to him as well. Of course, it turns out she is secretly a Nazi infiltrator, and she appeals to his pacifist mindset to steer him towards becoming sympathetic to Germany.
Being made in WWII, this is a film that says a lack of enthusiasm towards war is as evil as actively assisting the enemy. This is nothing other than straight-forward propaganda, without a development arc for any of the characters and, once we realize that, there is no suspense.
Given those limitations, there also isn’t much for the actors to do with these paper-thin characters. I was grateful for the tangents where we see more of the interactions between Sutton and Barns. These scenes are slight, but the rapport between them rings true and I would have preferred to see a film centered on them.
Alas, Lake fares the worst of the cast, with her vaguely European accent lapsing at least once in almost every line she speaks. A truly bizarre moment is when she drifts into something that sounds vaguely like a Mae West impersonation. Her performance is bad even when she doesn’t have any dialogue, as she openly shoots a diabolical side-eye whenever anything is said in her presence which she can use to her advantage. I think it speaks poorly of the British if nobody in this family ever notices how superficially evil she is at all times.
Something I found odd is a pre-credit sequence where the author of the story this is based on, W. Somerset Maugham, appears on camera with his back to us, before reaching for a large, flimsy, leather-bound book at his side. When he opens it, it is revealed this is the text of the film we’re about to see. Given this volume looks to be around two by three feet, this must be the exceptionally large print edition, possibly for reading by normal people from the other side of a mid-sized room.
But the most gloriously weird and daft moment of The Hour Before the Dawn is when we see an adorable miniature plane make a landing at a secret airfield which has an artificial hillside which, when opened, becomes a hangar for the plane to roll into. It is like something out of the 60’s sci-fi puppet show Thunderbirds, and I literally laughed until I cried. Given how dry, humorless and pedantic this film is, it could have used more scenes like this.
Dir: Frank Tuttle
Starring Veronica Lake, Franchot Tone
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray