The Hour Before the Dawn

Have done for a while highly appreciated W Somerset Maugham's work, some may find it old-fashioned but to me his sharp prose, insight and witticisms delight. Can absolutely see why his work is celebrated and do wish it was adapted more.

Franchot Tone is a teacher from a landed country family in England. As the events in Europe unroll, from the Anschluss through the seizing of the Sudetenland, he remains a staunch and reasoned pacifist.

I was unaware of this film till I found it on youtube.Initially I viewed it because of my interest in Veronica Lake.

This film is generally regarded as the beginning of Veronica Lake's decline from major stardom. She plays an Austrian refugee living in an English stately home at the beginning of the war.

Surely not the greatest antiwar picture ever made but hardly as bad as its reputation suggests. Veronica is a Nazi agent pretending to be an exile from her country who has managed to wheedle her way into wealthy Binnie Barnes good graces.

In the mid 1920s, English gentlemen Jim Hetherton (Franchot Tone) meets and marries Austrian refugee, Dora Bruckmann (Veronica Lake). Little does he know that she's a Nazi sympathizer and as the years pass, she harbors dreams of German conquest.