Yellow Canary

Yellow Canary (1943)

Blonde and Beautiful...Despised and Hated!...

In 1940 Sally Maitland is forced to leave England, ostracised as a Nazi sympathiser by everyone including her well-to-do family. On the ship to Halifax, Canada, she is courted by Polish aristocrat Jan Orloch and by awkward British navel intelligence officer Jimmy Garrick. She shows herself somewhat more amenable to Orloch's advances, and agrees to meet his mother in Halifax. Once there however, it becomes clear no-one is really who they say they are.

Date of release
1943-12-13
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Drama, Thriller, War
Director
Herbert Wilcox

Casting

Interesting facts

Yellow Canary is a 1943 British drama film directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring Anna Neagle, Richard Greene and Albert Lieven. Neagle plays a British Nazi sympathiser who travels to Halifax, Canada, trailed by spies from both sides during the Second World War. Neagle and director/producer Wilcox collaborated on a number of previous film projects.

Production

Although never identified as Unity Mitford, the central character played by Neagle has some obvious similarities to the pro-Nazi British dilettante who had a great deal of notoriety in pre-war times. In production during 1943, while the United Kingdom was still fearful of Nazi spies, Yellow Canary was obviously made as wartime propaganda, with the aim to keep up morale and also warn the British public to be on their guard.

Co-stars Richard Greene and Margaret Rutherford both went on to further success and Rutherford was especially adept at scene-stealing in Yellow Canary. Greene was in the armed forces at this time and had interrupted his successful acting career to serve in the Second World War in the 27th Lancers, where he distinguished himself. After three months, he went to Sandhurst and was commissioned.

Although set aboard a ship in the early scenes, the majority of the principal photography for Yellow Canary took place at the massive lots at Denham Film Studios (D&P Studios), located near the village of Denham, Buckinghamshire. All of the location sequences of Halifax were strictly "B" roll, but did provide a realistic, "atmospheric" look at wartime conditions in the busy Canadian military and civilian port.

After production had wrapped, Neagle and Wilcox made their professional relationship a personal one as well when they married on 9 August 1943.

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

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