Pastor Hall (1940)

This is quite a gruelling film to watch, this one. Wilfrid Lawson is the eponymous minister who lived in a small German village in the 1930s as the Nazi party started on it's inevitable route to power. A decent man, he tried to resist the increasingly anti-semitic aspirations of the Party but with the arrival of some stormtroopers under the command of the malevolent, but cunning, "Gerte" (Marius Goring) his task becomes much harder and his own safety, and that of his young daughter "Christine" (Nova Pilbeam) looks more and more precarious. It's based on a true character, and the story has an authenticity to it that papers over the cracks left by the limitations of an early wartime production with what I assume was a modest budget. Lawson is very effective in the title role, as are Goring and Pilbeam and there is an interesting contribution from Seymour Hicks as "Gen. von Grotjahn" - a German general officer from days gone by when honour and respect meant more than any loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Eventually sent to Dachau, the history takes quite an interesting turn at an end that I found immensely satisfying on a number of fronts. The narrative does try to explain a little of just how these fascist thugs won over an otherwise benign population - fear, lies, rumour, gossip and resentment all playing a part in galvanising a population into a complicit inactivity that allowed persecution and brutality on a scale that they knew little about, but about which they cared even less. Out of sight... etc. There is a particularly harrowing storyline featuring the young "Lina" (Lina Barrie) which rather summed the whole thing up - and showed the bravery and decency of this man of not just God, but of his congregation too. Rarely seen nowadays, but thought-provoking and well worth ninety minutes if you ever come across it