... by way of comment on other reviews.
The Saturday-morning serial-style string of improbable cliffhangers and solutions probably didn't need a lot of time. Maybe the pip-pip-cheerio RAF protocols near the beginning (for which the RAF gets a credit) too a little more effort.
Most interesting and unusual is that the Germans actually speak German (except when officers don't want to be understood by Other Ranks). Many have pretty heavy American accents, but even some of those do pretty well with the dialogue. High marks to Raymond Massey's obvious struggles with quite a lot of lines, while he also has to keep his evil monocle screwed in (even when machine-gunned in the end).
There's not a trace of dialect or colloquial usage, and as another reviewer noticed the officers sometimes use improbable polite-address forms when barking at the privates.
All the same, the whole effort is really exceptional, I think. It even becomes a sort of plot point, since whenever Our Heroes want to get into deeper trouble, one of them speaks English at an in appropriate moment.
The usual later convention seems to be that German officers speak English with sneering, sort-of-British accents, and enlisted men speak English with comical German accents. The converse is "Hangmen Also Die," where the evil Germans (including Werner Klemperer) speak with German accents, but the gallant Czechs all speak American.
The suggestion that this must have been in production even before Pearl Harbor and the end of American restrictions on war propaganda in films seems a bit strained to me. I don't see anything in this movie that would have needed more than two or three weeks to produce, and not much more to edit.
Even the other familiar convention, It Takes All Kinds to Win the War, didn't get quite as much work-up as other British or American war films. One Australian (with a not very Australian accent, and the only German-speaker in the crew), one Canadian (an American without Canadian accent), one Scot (an American without Scottish accent), and an American (but not a Polish-, Italian- or other hyphenated American).
The Saturday-morning serial-style string of improbable cliffhangers and solutions probably didn't need a lot of time. Maybe the pip-pip-cheerio RAF protocols near the beginning (for which the RAF gets a credit) too a little more effort.
Most interesting and unusual is that the Germans actually speak German (except when officers don't want to be understood by Other Ranks). Many have pretty heavy American accents, but even some of those do pretty well with the dialogue. High marks to Raymond Massey's obvious struggles with quite a lot of lines, while he also has to keep his evil monocle screwed in (even when machine-gunned in the end).
There's not a trace of dialect or colloquial usage, and as another reviewer noticed the officers sometimes use improbable polite-address forms when barking at the privates.
All the same, the whole effort is really exceptional, I think. It even becomes a sort of plot point, since whenever Our Heroes want to get into deeper trouble, one of them speaks English at an in appropriate moment.
The usual later convention seems to be that German officers speak English with sneering, sort-of-British accents, and enlisted men speak English with comical German accents. The converse is "Hangmen Also Die," where the evil Germans (including Werner Klemperer) speak with German accents, but the gallant Czechs all speak American.
The suggestion that this must have been in production even before Pearl Harbor and the end of American restrictions on war propaganda in films seems a bit strained to me. I don't see anything in this movie that would have needed more than two or three weeks to produce, and not much more to edit.
Even the other familiar convention, It Takes All Kinds to Win the War, didn't get quite as much work-up as other British or American war films. One Australian (with a not very Australian accent, and the only German-speaker in the crew), one Canadian (an American without Canadian accent), one Scot (an American without Scottish accent), and an American (but not a Polish-, Italian- or other hyphenated American).