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Overrated and overhyped

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Tim McCoy (Tim Dale), Billie Seward (Barbara), Joseph Crehan (Robinson), Ward Bond (Bob), Kane Richmond (Jack), Frank Layton (Matthews), Guy Usher (Benton), Francis McDonald (Jackson), Alphonse Ethier (W.T. Dale).Director: CHARLES C. COLEMAN. Screennplay: Harold Shumate. Photography: John S. Stumar. Film editor: John Rawlins. Western Electric Sound System. Copyright 24 March 1934 by Columbia Pictures Corp. No recorded New York opening. Australian release through Greater A.F.: 7 November 1934. 6 reels. SYNOPSIS: "Dedicated to that fighting legion without which a nation cannot exist-those unsung heoes of the storm: the telephone men!"COMMENT: High-speed car chases, a fight on a cable car, plus the dynamiting of a swollen river, all add up to plenty of fast-moving excitement for Tim McCoy fans. The support cast is solid too. I could list them one by one, but will content myself by listing Ward Bond, Joseph Crehan, and the most enticing Billie Seward.Technical credits are likewise admirably professional.

This film is currently turning up regularly on Film4 in the UK. It's still worth watching for a flavour of the sort of stuff bring shown during the second world war. Not too propagandist - in fact most of the bad things shown proved to be fact when the war was won.Incidentally, one reviewer seems to think that the doctor was German - he was in fact Austrian (like Mr. Hitler!).I didn't realise that the action was taking place in Austria as one reviewer tells us.Like others I had no problem with the actors not trying to speak with German accents. I prefer this to half the cast speaking the Queen's (or should it be King's) English and all the 'baddies' speaking with 'evil' German accents.At the date of this comment the film is appearing on Film4.

The movie is set in Austria at the time of the Anschluss-its merger with Nazi Germany .The main character is a well respected and highly placed medical man ,Dr Karl Roder whose patients include the world's most famous ex- housepainter ,the testicularly challenged Herr Hitler himself .Roder detests the Nazi party but his actress wife Irena is less politically aware and is flattered to be appointed as a party functionary (Director of Pagenntry).Roder sees his anti-Nazi friends disappear and one ,a priest ,is murdered before his eyes .(The theme of anti-Nazi German clerics was explored in the contemporaneous movie Pastor Hall which is worth watching as well).He resolves to strike back by opening a propagandist and wholly illegal radio station -Radio Freedom with the aid of a young engineer whose fiancé has been abused by the Nazis The movie is crisply directed by the ever dependable Anthony Asquith and it makes good use of authentic period footage of Nazi rallies and parades.The cast make no attempt whatsoever to speak in German or Austrain accents and the clipped tones of the West end stage of the time are heard from leading players such as Clive Brook and Diana Wyngarde as Roder and Irena .Raymond Huntley is an impressive villain and the cast includes such stalwart supporting players as Martita Hunt ,playing a snooping neighbour,Joan Hickson and the Hammer studios luminary to be .Clifford Evans ,and Bernard Miles The movie does conjure up the sense of suspicion ,fear and distrust of the era and serves as an effective counter to the pacifist nonsense of such trash as John Ford's celluloid garbage "The World Moves On" Well made and worthy but not top drawer

The title isn't promising, and certainly I could find nothing but disparagement for "Freedom Radio" when I looked it up before today's broadcast: 'tedious propaganda drama' (programme guide), 'outdated and unintentionally funny... accents totally unsuited to middle-European characters' (Radio Times). Maltin, meanwhile, doesn't even bother to give it a mention.So I was very pleasantly surprised to find it an intelligent drama about Germans in the 1930s who gradually come to realise that their country is becoming more and more totalitarian, and are pushed into an attempt at redressing the balance with the only weapon they can think of: the conviction that if only, somehow, they can get the truth out there, things will change. For our part we know, of course, that it didn't work; even they know they won't be able to get away with it indefinitely (although having an ally on the inside can prove invaluable...) But in a world where friends and neighbours are swept up by national loyalty and propaganda or become informers for their own personal profit, in a Nazi Germany that is not yet at war -- even a gesture at resistance can give hope.As a propaganda piece this is quite extraordinarily restrained: the entire cast are played (hence the 'accents' jibe -- might the reviewer have found comic Teutonic vowels less disturbing, perhaps?) as people 'like us', as ordinary Englishmen and women of the period, from the young workman to the nosy neighbour and the Society doctor. The young artist Otto, whose SS work gradually takes over his life, has the vocabulary of a thoughtless young public-school-boy; the Gestapo officer Rabenau who tracks the heroes down is an upright and keen-eyed Intelligence commander who could have stepped out of Fighter Command HQ, not a Prussian caricature. When you consider that the film was made in the darkest days of the Second World War, the decision not merely to show 'good Germans', but to show 'bad Germans' -- Nazi loyalists -- as human (and to eschew the use of heavy foreign accents to represent foreigners speaking in their own language) is impressive.If this film had been made in Hollywood, it would doubtless have featured a young Allied agent or second-generation American (like Karl von Austreim in Mary Pickford's "The Little American" of 1917 -- another film unfortunately written off as 'propaganda') to inspire the locals to acts of heroism. But there is no such facile audience-identification figure: we are forced to place ourselves in the position of pre-war Germans, those same Germans against whom the British cinema in 1941 might have been expected to whip up mindless hate. Instead, they're sympathetic characters. Some of them become ardent Nazi supporters; that doesn't make them less human. It only produces ultimately agonising conflict...Clive Brook, as ever, is superb as the thinking man's thinking man; Diana Wynyard brings conviction to the role of his wife, the actress whose talent brings favour from the Fuehrer himself. Raymond Huntley makes Rabenau a formidable yet admirable opponent who is never likely to be fooled for long, while the younger couple -- Derek Farr and Joyce Howard -- provide easy appeal to the eye as the young workman and his sweetheart.The production values betray a wartime budget: the obvious impossibility of shooting on location in Continental Europe, the stock footage of Nazi parades, and the restricted sets and shortage of extras -- for example, we only ever see Irena's stage triumphs from behind the curtain, and the Gestapo never seem to be able to muster more than half a dozen members at once. There is also a telltale moment when the supposed passage of the Budapest express is marked by the unmistakable shriek of an English locomotive whistle! The script, on the other hand, benefits from a similar parsimony. Little is stated outright if the information can instead be implied: especially in the opening sequences. We know the chilling truth behind the 'rest home' for an inconveniently hysterical witness -- the characters don't. Exposition is neatly avoided, and by and large the film displays an admirable subtlety and restraint. The exception, naturally, is in the rival radio broadcasts -- state propaganda on the one side, claims of debunking on the other -- and there were moments at the end when I felt that the content of the impassioned speeches was too obviously aimed at wartime audiences rather than the 1930s populace it supposedly addressed. But under the circumstances, and given the inevitable ending, the attempt at some kind of upbeat content is understandable.Frankly, the only reason I bothered to sit down to watch this in the first place was the presence of the names of Anthony Asquith and Clive Brook, both old friends from the silent era.... and I wasn't hoping for much. But I've seen some inferior films recently, and this, surprisingly, wasn't one of them: in fact, it reminded me rather of Leslie Howard's "Pimpernel Smith". Too 'British' for American viewers, perhaps: too 'outdated' for the modern generation. Personally, I found its depiction of a society of creeping totalitarianism both unsettling, and more than a little thought-provoking, even today.