User Reviews

This a crazed film, which overrides many of the regular expectations of an audience. Rains is the complacent middle class American who goes on a fishing trip - only to discover upon his return that America has been turned into a dictatorship, and what he once held for granted and most dear is now denied him and trampled upon. America has been transformed into an occupied country.

Obler is one of those Z-grade directors whose career often contained gems of movie making. As with the more talented Edgar Ulmer, the liberty of working with such low budgets meant that his personal vision was able to reach the screen more accurately, and without the interference common in larger studios. Whether or not he agreed with the stark warning explicit in Strange Holiday, the result is more like a cinematic rant, a government propaganda piece than a story. Claude Rains gives his usual cultured performance (and indeed is far too good for this material). His persona of cultured smugness, suddenly shocked into political reality, is all the more effective because of the actor he is. In some ways this is a noir in extremis. But unlike a 'true' film noir, the feeling of paranoia and persecution in Strange Holiday is entirely justified.

The final scene, with Rains alone in his cell, at the end of his tether, repeating democratic tag lines and fragments of his hard learned experience is both monotonous and frightening at the same time.

A film to watch, but not an easy one to enjoy. Perhaps that was the point, as the frightened anger, even panic, of the film makers is tangible throughout. As a relic of social hysteria, if nothing else, it is certainly unique.

STRANGE HOLIDAY is, sure enough, a strange little movie, almost amateur in feel. It's less a proper feature film than a polemic on the evils of fascism, which must have been on everybody's mind when this was first released back in 1945. Claude Rains is reliably good as a family man who goes off on a holiday with a friend only to return to find America taken over by a fascism regime. The film stalls at that point and becomes interminable; the idea of America being invaded by various unpleasant types has done the rounds ever since (THE HANDMAID'S TALE is a pretty interesting modern TV interpretation of the story) but this is one of its earliest outings. A shame it's not a better film.

Anti-Fascist propaganda at its most fear mongering, this D grade film wasn't even made at PRC, the poverty row studio that released it. General Motors made this film for its employees, and it certainly needed a more professional screenplay than the one it got. With a better script, this could have been an interesting B feature at Warner Brothers or Columbia, but what ends up on the screen seems forced and manipulative and considering that the war was almost over, pointless.

With the always gripping Claude Rains in the lead role, you'd think that they'd have something a little more professional, but unfortunately, this is like a rushed out "Crime Does Not Pay" short or one of those poor RKO educational shorts that really failed to deliver anything interesting. Rains is the editor of a newspaper who goes on a fishing trip and when he rushes back on Friday the 13th, discovers that the town is basically abandoned, and when he goes home, he's knocked over the head and put in prison. When he wakes up, he's brutally questioned and tortured by the most stereotyped of movie Nazis, Martin Koszleck.

So in two weeks time, the United States has been taken over by fascists (presumably the Nazis), and Rains' family is missing. He does get to see wife Gloria Holden, but he's not allowed to get any news on his children. This seems as if the script was edited and large globs of pages were either never filmed or edited out because so much seems missing. I don't want to go I wouldn't want any more running time on this version anyway because the agenda driven drama goes for shock value and reaction over reason and reality. PRC had more than their share of hideous exploitive propaganda films during the war, and this is near the top of the list as the most horrendous. Even the ending makes you want to throw bricks at the screen.

By the time this was released, World War 2 had finished a couple of months before. Thus, instead of being a "We're fighting for freedom with God on our side!" flagwaver, it is a "Don't let ANYONE take our freedom away" movie. Basically the plot involves everyman John Stevenson (Claude Rains) returning from a fishing holiday to find that Nazis have taken over America. Badly acted and directed with all the grace of Bambi wearing hob-nailed boots, this is a boring and tedious picture to watch. To be fair Claude Rains does his best with the dismal script. But, even for him, there is a limit to the number of ways he can utter the repeated line "There's been a terrible mistake.". While the rest of the now oppressed Americans simply wander around like extras in a zombie movie, responding to his questions with "What's happened? You don't know?" Or, "We can't answer your questions." It all started to look and sound like a pale imitation of one of Kafka's stories. In fact, bearing in mind that the film is only an hour long, it is at around 40 minutes when Stevenson actually finds out what has gone on during his absence. And this is only after he has been picked up by the gestapo and brutally interrogated. One of the most ironic, and hypocritical, scenes is when Stevenson is banged up in a cell with an ageing African-American who laments that "they" have rescinded the Bill of Rights. Yeah, as if that made any difference to HIS reality! The sledgehammer montage with strident voiceover explaining why flabby, ineffectual democracy had failed due to lack of "discipline" is completely over the top. Apart from which the film doesn't seem to go anywhere. After further beating , Stevenson is thrown into a cell with the expectation that he will die. However, he drags himself to his feet and croaks out a warning to the audience about how precious freedom is and never taking it for granted. It's all rather embarassing really.