Dir: Annabel Jankel | War Biopic | UK/Hungarian
Reviewed by Peter Herbert
Viewers with long memories may recall the 1942 Raoul Walsh/Errol Flynn film Desperate Journey in which the crew of a doomed British bomber escape from Nazi captors out of Germany.
A new film with the same title directed by Annabel Jankel has a plot line that also appears not a million miles removed from standard film tropes of war time set films. Both films are polished studio entertainments with above average budgets and production values, inspired by factual incidents from the WW2 era, providing a degree of fact to underline dramatic fiction.
The source of the latest Desperate Journey is the true story of Freddy Knoller who as a teenage boy was separated from his Jewish family in 1938 during the rise of Nazi fascism and managed against the odds to survive before arriving in England where he lived to the age of 100 and was able to tell his story of courage and resilience.
The story is described as a flashback as to how he disguised his Jewish origins, worked as a form of youthful bouncer pimp in a nightclub frequented by Nazis, made enough money to pay for fake identity papers and had a romantic liaison which bought about his capture by Nazis. The drama is framed by what happened to him during the final violent liberation of Germany from the Nazi reign of terror.
The film is sensitively acted by Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen as Freddy Knoller with well-observed cameos from a range of actors including Niamh Cusack and Steven Berkoff who bring to life scenes with a moral awareness of what anyone will do, to survive trauma.
Set designs for the production filmed in Hungary are convincing with well observed details including a Hitchcockian sequence demonstrating how difficult it can be to kill a person. Stylish and beautiful cabaret numbers at times appear too polished (the director is noted for Talking Heads/Max Headroom music videos) although the script is also deceptive.
Desperate Journey benefits from the writing skills of Michael Radford who directed Another Time Another Place in 1986 which sensitively observed the integration of a refugee into a hostile foreign country during WW2.
Desperate Journey has a cinema film scale and scope beyond most current Television / streaming based WW2 dramas and Jankel manages to escape most of the melodramatic sentimentality of Steve McQueen’s Blitz. This is largely achieved through the sensitive handling of performances, effective edits and impressive camerawork by the Hungarian cameraman Gergely Poharnok.
The true facts of the story as revealed during the final credit titles provide underlying resonance for a film finely balancing fact and fiction for essentially an entertainment with a message aimed at a contemporary mainstream audience. Pbh v
NOW ON RELEASE IN UK CINEMAS