Edge of Darkness

Edge of Darkness (1943)

Resistance fighters battle the Nazis in occupied Norway

The film pivots around the local Norwegian doctor and his family. The doctor's wife (Ruth Gordon) wants to hold on to the pretence of gracious living and ignore their German occupiers. The doctor, Martin Stensgard (Walter Huston), would also prefer to stay neutral, but is torn. His brother-in-law, the wealthy owner of the local fish cannery, collaborates with the Nazis. The doctor's daughter, Karen (Ann Sheridan), is involved with the resistance and with its leader Gunnar Brogge (Errol Flynn). The doctor's son has just returned to town, having been sent down from the university, and is soon influenced by his Nazi-sympathizer uncle. Captain Koenig (Helmut Dantine), the young German commandant of the occupying garrison, whose fanatic determination to do everything by the book and spoutings about the invincibility of the Reich hides a growing fear of a local uprising.

Date of release
1943-04-09
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (41)
Runtime
1h 59m
Genres
Drama, War
Director
Lewis Milestone

Casting

Interesting facts

Edge of Darkness is a 1943 World War II film directed by Lewis Milestone that features Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, and Walter Huston. The feature is based on a script written by Robert Rossen which was adapted from the 1942 novel The Edge of Darkness by William Woods.

Production

Edge of Darkness was based on the debut novel of William Woods. Warner Bros. Pictures bought the film rights in January 1942 for $30,000. The novel was published on April 9, the second anniversary of the German invasion of Norway.

Henry Blanke was assigned to produce, Robert Rossen to write the script and Lewis Milestone to direct. Milestone later told the press:

It is twelve years now since I made All Quiet on the Western Front. That film embodied the retrospective disillusionment toward another war. In Edge of Darkness we are making a picture that has done away with disillusionment. We know the enemy we are fighting and we are facing the stern realities of the present war. The moral in Edge of Darkness is that 'united we stand, divided we fall'. That is the keystone for victory in all the democracies.

"I can't think of a story about which I could be more enthusiastic," said Blanke about Edge of Darkness.

The job of writing the script was given to Robert Rossen. Milestone later said Rossen "hit on an idiom for the dialogue that had nothing to do with Norway but derived mainly from the language he knew best - the speechways of New York's East Side. Since nobody else knew the difference the idiom worked admirably."

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

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