This Land Is Mine (1943)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

The second of six feature-length films that director Jean Renoir made during his seven year long sojourn in the United States is the one that is least typical of his work and, for that reason, the most interesting.  Breaking temporarily with the poetic realist style that he had perfected in the late 1930s, with such films as La Grande illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939), Renoir crafts a melodramatic propaganda piece that is more theatrical in style, very different from the strikingly realist film noir Swamp Water (1941) that he had just made whilst under contract with Twentieth Century Fox.  Renoir and his screenwriting partner Dudley Nichols had a clear objective when they began work on This Land Is Mine - to attempt to rationalise the ease with which the countries of Europe (France in particular) succumbed to Nazi occupation, thereby helping to galvanise American support in the war against Fascism. 

Renoir and Nichols's thesis was that it was not German military superiority that allowed the Nazis to conquer most of Europe, but the willingness of the conquered nations to submit, in the misguided hope of minimising the disruption to their everyday lives.  It was only after they had fallen under Nazi control that the French people realised what they had lost, the basic freedoms that they had fought long and hard to secure for themselves.  It is this, the price of submission to a tyrannous regime, that the film expresses with sublime eloquence in its devastatingly poignant denouement, something that makes it one of the most effective and memorable of all wartime propaganda films.  The film is also forceful in its condemnation of the complacency of the political and middle classes and their willingness to cooperate with the Nazis for personal advantage, a direct swipe at the collaborationist Vichy regime in occupied France.

Of course Renoir himself had no first-hand experience of what it was like to live under Nazi occupation, as he had left France and taken the boat to America before the Germans took control of his country.  It is fair to criticise the film for its simplistic portrayal of life under occupation, which is a poor approximation to the reality experienced by, say, most French people at the time.  The characters in the film are, almost without exception, familiar stereotypes of the kind that would appeal to a contemporary American audience.  The propaganda subtext may be effective but it is surprisingly crude for a film auteur of Renoir's sophistication (especially when viewed alongside his far more intellectually minded pro-Communist pieces of the early 1930s).  It is easy to see why This Land Is Mine was so unpopular when it was first screened in France after the Liberation.  The critics tore it to shreds and audiences shunned it - it was not a picture of their country that they could ever recognise (although their hostility towards it may be taken as a sign that it contained more than a grain of truth).  Yet the film was hugely popular in the United States and has the distinction of being the only one for which Renoir won an Oscar (albeit in the lesser category of Best Sound).  In recent years, the film has grown considerably in stature and has become one of the most highly regarded of Renoir's films.

Made for RKO, the film's budgetary constraints are at times painfully evident  (most visibly in the limited used of real exterior locations), however such is the quality of Renoir's direction and the performances that this hardly matters.  The main strength of This Land Is Mine is its superb cast, which includes Charles Laughton at the height of his powers.  Laughton's character is the most problematic in the film - a cowardly schoolmaster who spends most of the film acting like an imbecilic child until he is suddenly transformed into a heroic orator in the final act.  It is a metamorphosis that would doubtless have confounded most of the great actors of the period but Laughton manages it with astonishing aplomb and subtlety, in a performance that is, quite possibly, his finest.  Maureen O'Hara, by contrast, gives a far less satisfying turn, of the kind that that would better serve a low-grade schmaltzy tear-jerker of the period. 

Far more impressive are George Sanders and Walter Slezak, who bring astonishing depth and humanity to the film's two most ambiguous and complex characters, a conflicted self-interested collaborator and a Nazi officer who has an obvious aversion to needless bloodshed.  Slezak's Major Keller is far removed from the one-dimensional German officers that appeared in most American propaganda films - he is cunning but he is also humane, not a demonic fiend who revels in cruelty.  Can we forgive Una O'Connor's outrageous scene-stealing histrionics as Charles Laughton's over-protective mother?  Certainly, as her presence brings vitality and genuine human feeling to offset the more strait-laced, moralistic passages of the film, giving a real sense of how ordinary people are affected by the barbarities of occupation.

This Land Is Mine has long been considered one of Renoir's lesser films, particularly in his native France.  Admittedly, it falls short of the excellence of his earlier masterpieces and the fact that it is an overt propaganda piece, created for a specific purpose, dates it and limits its appeal.  Yet, despite its simplistic handling of a contraversial subject and the fact that it is tainted by the kind of 1940s Hollywood sentimentality that is now considered distasteful by many film enthusiasts, it is assuredly the work of a master filmmaker.  No one can fail to be moved by the climactic courtroom scene in which Charles Laughton's character suddenly finds his voice and the courage to articulate why people should never submit to an occupying power.  His words have a resonance that is timeless and profoundly moving, and there is probably no other film of this era that makes a more succinct and powerful argument for why ordinary men and women should rise up and oppose the tyranny of the Nazis.

Film Synopsis

During WWII, the inhabitants of a small town somewhere in Europe are accustoming themselves to life under Nazi occupation.  Whilst Albert Lory, a cowardly middle-aged school teacher who is doted on by his elderly mother, lives in constant fear and willingly complies with whatever edicts come his way, his colleague Louise Martin is more defiant and resists the Nazis in her own modest way.  Louise's brother Paul is far more active in his resistance against the occupying power, participating in acts of sabotage and direct attacks on German soldiers.  After one such attack, Major Erich von Keller gives the order for hostages to be taken; unless the saboteur gives himself up, they will be executed in his place.  One of the hostages is Albert...