They Dare Not Love (Columbia, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Though we were watching it on a grey-label DVD with a couple of glitches in the middle, They Dare Not Love turned out to be a much better movie than either its predecessor or its reputation. It has virtually no reputation because James Whale, working for Columbia Pictures and its notoriously mean-spirited producer Harry Cohn, got fired from the film before it was finished and two directors, Victor Fleming and Charles Vidor, were put on it to replace him. (Fleming had previously taken over even more troubled productions like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind and brought them to completion, though Fleming was taken off Wizard to take over Gone With the Wind, and but Fleming got sole credit he only did the Oz scenes: King Vidor shot the prologue and epilogue in Kansas, including the most famous clip of Judy Garland’s career: her introduction of “Over the Rainbow.”)

They Dare Not Love was released May 16, 1941 and was therefore the product of a particularly fraught time in Hollywood’s – and America’s – relationship with World War II. The U.S. was not yet a combatant but President Franklin Roosevelt was clearly “tilting” the country in the direction of the Allies, particularly Britain, with decisions like the destroyers-for-bases deal and the passage of the Lend-Lease Act. The Hollywood studios – who were regularly being accused by isolationists of creating pro-Allied propaganda because they were mostly headed by Jews – in fact treaded cautiously: before 1941 only a handful of anti-Nazi films ere made in the U.S. (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Beasts of Berlin, The Mortal Storm), and most of them were personal projects of directors like Frank Borzage or stars like Edward G. Robinson who persuaded reluctant studio heads to greenlight them. Mostly Hollywood, like pre-war Britain and France, tried to appease the Nazis. Whale himself had suffered from this when his 1937 film The Road Back. set in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War I. was censored at the behest of the German consul in Los Angeles and released only in heavily butchered form. At a time when American movie companies were still allowed to release their films in Nazi Germany, they went so far to appease the Nazis that Louis B. Mayer sent Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment an affidavit that Clark Gable was uncircumcised so the Nazis would be assured he wasn’t Jewish and would therefore continue to allow his films to be shown in Germany.

By the time Harry Cohn greenlighted They Dare Not Love America’s pro-Allied “tilt” had become strong enough studio heads were more concerned about offending the U.S. government and therefore started trickling out more anti-Nazi films. Written by Charles Bennett (the writer who was basically to Alfred Hitchcock what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra, or Dudley Nichols to John Ford: Bennett wrote six of Hitchcock’s films as well as the source play for a seventh, and many of the devices we think of as “Hitchcockian” were originally created on Bennett’s pages) and Ernest Vajda (whom Whale had worked with in his glory days at the Laemmles’ Universal), They Dare Not Love begins with a series of titles explaining that Hitler and his forces have just occupied Austria and some gripping scenes showing the consequences of this for ordinary Austrians. (There’s been a lot of historical debate as to whether Austria, which Hitler annexed on March 11, 1938, was “Hitler’s first victim” – as the Austrians themselves like to say – or Hitler’s willing partner, since there were plenty of Austrian Nazis, some of them in high government positions, who were all too eager to become part of the Reich,. A bit of this debate actually enters into the script of They Dare Not Love, but the film takes the position that Austrians are not Germans and Hitler’s annexation was a conquest, not a friendly takeover.)

The opening sequences of They Dare Not Love seem to be the scenes in James Whale’s later career that (aside from the dungeon scenes in The Man in the Iron Mask, a good but workmanlike film that could have been directed by just about anybody) turned him on more than anything he’d done since The Road Back. Certainly there was no love lost between James Whale and the Germans – he’d been a prisoner in a German POW camp for two years during World War I and more recently he’d had the indignity of the Nazis effectively censored The Road Back, a film which could have been a masterpiece if the Nazis hadn’t butted in and Universal (fearful of losing foreign revenues not only in Germany but Brazil and China, countries with which Germany had reciprocal trade treaties) hadn’t caved. The opening scenes of They Dare Not Love promise a great movie, and though the promise isn’t quite fulfilled it’s still an estimable film and quite a bit better than its reputation. The film’s biggest problem is its preposterous central character, Prince Kurt von Rotenberg (George Brent), whom we’re supposed to believe is a descendant of Austria’s hereditary royal family (which one?) and a figure of such towering authority and stature he could personally lead a revolution against Austria’s new occupiers and millions of Austrians would flock to his cause and make the Nazis’ rule impossible.

So they’re out to get him at all costs, and he and his household staff are planning to escape to Czechoslovakia – only the Prince, irrepressible ninny that he is, first wants to stop at an old Viennese café because he hears their band playing a Johann Strauss, Jr. waltz. At the café he meets Marta Keller (Martha Scott), an old childhood girlfriend but one he’d abandoned because she’s a commoner and therefore, you guessed it, they dared not love. Instead she’s become engaged to another guy, who runs into her at the café, recognizes the prince and turns out to be a Nazi spy who calls the Gestapo on him. The Germans raid the club and Kurt and Marta barely get away in time, then end up together on an ocean liner bound for America. Only Kurt has an American fiancée, Barbara Murdock (Kay Linaker), and rather than confront the Other Woman Marta sneaks away and Kurt and Barbara have a fling that seems to consist mostly of attending horse races and other opportunities for gambling. Fortunately, Barbara realizes that Kurt is neglecting his responsibilities to go home and lead the anti-Nazi resistance, and she sends him away. Kurt and Marta end up together on an ocean liner they think is a Belgian ship taking them to a conveniently neutral country, only unbeknownst to them just before the ship sails the German government buys it and installs their own crew to sail it to Hamburg, where Kurt will be arrested for his crimes against the Reich.

Fortunately, the captain (Egon Brecher) turns out to be an old-school German who’s afraid to confront the Nazis directly for fear they’ll go after his family in Germany, but he’s willing to marry Kurt and Marta on his own authority (and without the humiliating Nazi ritual of asking both of them to certify they are of “pure Aryan blood,” a necessity under Nazi law) even though that gets him accused of fraternizing with the enemy by the harder-line Nazis on his crew, who make it clear that they’re keeping him alive for the present because they need his skills as a navigator, but once they dock in Hamburg … Eventually a deus ex machina arrives in the form of a British destroyer which, seeing a ship flying the Nazi flag just as World War II has been declared (the captain got a message that the war nad started but no one else on board knew that), starts firing on it and demands that the Germans allow the British crew to board it and take everyone on board prisoner. Needless to say, Kurt and Marta are overjoyed to be rescued by representatives of a country on the right side of the struggle against fascism – much to the surprise of the typical comic-relief British doofus who formally takes custody of them – and the film ends with Kurt and Marta daring to love at last.

They Dare Not Love is a film that marks the end of James Whale’s career – he would make only one other film, a 30-minute short called Hello Out There (more on that later) in 1949 – but also a dry run for all the movies the U.S. would make about romance and intrigue against the backdrop of World War II. In some ways They Dare Not Love is a sort of beta version of Casablanca, with Kurt as a combination Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo and Marta as his Ilsa Lund, both trying to maneuver their emotional needs with their shared commitment to the fight against fascism. If They Dare Not Love doesn’t blend the elements of romance, intrigue and heroic resistance as well as Casablanca, well, what film did? One sees They Dare Not Love as one of Hollywood’s first gropings towards an approach to the war that would dramatize the Nazi evil without outright scenes of violence and without showing the actual war, and which would counterpoint romance and intrigue in ways that would hold the audience’s interest.

It’s also a movie that is full of characters with ambiguous loyalties; given how much imposture is one of Whale’s running themes as a director, he must have been gratified to work on a story in which so many characters are not what they seem – including Paul Lukas, who like Vajda had worked with Whale in his glory days (as the client in The Kiss Before the Mirror) and who manages to keep both the lead characters and us off balance as to whether he’ll turn out to be a Nazi or an anti-Nazi. Part of the problem with They Dare Not Love is the cast; according to Bette Davis, George Brent was drop-dead gorgeous in persion and virtually every woman who worked with him (including Davis herself) had the hots for him – but on screen he comes off as no more than ordinarily attractive (the opposite of doomed icons like Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe, both of whom – according to people who knew them – were no more than ordinarily attractive in the flesh but came off as sex gods on film), and he never could act for beans. Martha Scott is professionally competent but little more – imagine this film with Bogart and Bergman in the leads and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s wrong with it as it stands! Still, They Dare Not Love is a lot better than its reputation, and it deserves a full restoration and re-evaluation not only as James Whale’s last feature but an early landmark in the U.S. depiction of World War II on film.