The Hour Before the Dawn

The Hour Before the Dawn (1944)

W. Somerset Maugham's most savage portrait of a dangerous woman!

A beautiful Austrian refugee in England--who is also a Nazi agent--marries a scholarly English pacifist. He lives near a secret military base she needs to get information about so she can help in Hitler's planned invasion of England.

Date of release
1944-05-10
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 15m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Frank Tuttle

Casting

Interesting facts

The Hour Before the Dawn is a 1944 American drama war film directed by Frank Tuttle starring Franchot Tone and Veronica Lake. It was based on the 1942 novel by W. Somerset Maugham.

Production

The novel was published in 1942. Film rights were bought by Paramount while the project was in galley form, prior to Pearl Harbor. When the book was published, it became a best seller, but Paramount were reluctant to make a film based on it because it was about a conscientious objector - something that was felt to be palatable to the American public while the USA was neutral, but not after.

The movie was the first film produced by William Dozier, who had worked as a story editor at Paramount for a number of years. Shooting started in April 1943. Because of dim-out restrictions, night scenes were shot in Phoenix, Arizona.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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