Hostages

Lieutenant Hans Conreid of the occupying German forces in Prague kills himself. Chief of Police Paul Lukas and his commanding general see a way to squeeze coal magnate Oscar Homolka. They announce Conreid has been murdered, and that twenty-five Czechs currently in jail, including Homolka will be shot as hostages if the murderer is not turned in for a 50,000-crown reward. The Underground has other ideas.

It's from a novel by Helmut Flieg under his pseudonym of Stefan Heym, published in 1942, and it shows it in the pacing of the film, with several sequences in which people give speeches; I suspect that the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the destruction of the town of Lidice in retaliation made the management of Paramount rush it through production to keep it fresh. Nonetheless, there are some good performances, including Luise Rainer in her last Hollywood-era movie, Arturo de Córdova as a rather ambiguous figure in the beginning, and William Bendix, as a washroom attendant who turns out to be something more. Full of talk about freedom, Flieg's obvious Communist attitudes easily passed wartime muster, and he returned to East Germany a hero.

Despite the occasionally stagey speeches, it's an artfully plotted story; I was not sure until the very end who was going to get out alive and how. With Katina Paxinou, Reinhold Schünzel, and Steven Geray.