Bon Voyage

Alfred Hitchcock made two 30-minute propaganda films to help the war effort … in French! They are in support of the Resistance, I presume to help both the Brits and the French in exile to keep a stiff upper lip. This one concerns the debriefing of an RAF flier shot down and captured over France, who later breaks out of prison and seeks help from the underground. We flash back and forth between him telling the tale and seeing how it came down … or how he thinks it came down. It turns out there was a lot more going on than he realized, and none of it was good. It’s dark and well-filmed, and full of the usual hugger-mugger with passwords and clandestine meetings and such, but it’s a little hard for me to see the point of it all, unless the moral is something like “loose lips sink ships.” But the poor flier couldn’t really have been expected to know there was a stinking Vichy spy in the Resistance, could he?