Pastor Hall | |
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![]() U.S. poster | |
Directed by | Roy Boulting |
Produced by | John Boulting |
Written by | Leslie Arliss Anna Reiner Haworth Bromley John Boulting Roy Boulting Miles Malleson |
Based on | the play Pastor Hall (1939) by Ernst Toller [1] |
Starring | Wilfrid Lawson Nova Pilbeam Marius Goring Seymour Hicks |
Music by | Charles Brill Hans May (as Mac Adams) |
Cinematography | Mutz Greenbaum |
Edited by | Roy Boulting |
Production company | Charter Film Productions |
Distributed by | Grand National Pictures (UK) |
Release date | 27 May 1940 (London) (UK) |
Running time | 95 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Budget | £25,000 [2] |
Pastor Hall is a 1940 British drama film directed by Roy Boulting and starring Wilfrid Lawson, Nova Pilbeam, Marius Goring, Seymour Hicks and Bernard Miles. [3] The film is based on the play of the same title by German author Ernst Toller who had lived as an emigrant in the United States until his suicide in 1939. [4] The U.S. version of the film opened with a prologue by Eleanor Roosevelt denouncing the Nazis, and her son James Roosevelt presented the film in the US through United Artists. [5]
The film was based on the true story of the German pastor Martin Niemöller who was sent to Dachau concentration camp for criticizing the Nazi Party. In the 1930s, a small German village, Altdorf, is taken over by a platoon of stormtroopers loyal to Hitler. The SS go about teaching and enforcing 'The New Order' but the pastor, a kind and gentle man, will not be intimidated. While some villagers join the Nazi Party avidly, and some just go along with things, hoping for a quiet life, the pastor takes his convictions to the pulpit. Because of his criticism of the Nazis, the pastor is sent to Dachau.
The New York Times reviewer wrote that "not until Pastor Hall opened last night at the Globe has any film come so close to the naked spiritual issues involved in the present conflict or presented them in terms so moving. If it is propaganda, it is also more...In its production the film is mechanically inferior. The sound track is uneven, the lighting occasionally bad. But in its performances it has been well endowed. Much of the film's dignity and cumulative emotion comes from the fine performance of Wilfrid Lawson as the pastor." [6] while TV Guide called the film "far less heavy-handed than most wartime films Hollywood cranked out after Pearl Harbor." [5]
Dachau is a town in Upper Bavaria district of Bavaria, a state in the southern part of Germany. It is a major district town—a Große Kreisstadt—of the administrative region of Upper Bavaria, about 20 kilometres north-west of Munich. It is now a popular residential area for people working in Munich, with roughly 45,000 inhabitants. The historic centre of town with its 18th-century castle is situated on an elevation and visible over a great distance.
Wilhelm Gustloff was the founder of the Swiss NSDAP/AO at Davos. He remained its leader from 1932 until he was assassinated in 1936.
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Ernst Julius Günther Röhm was a German military officer and an early member of the Nazi Party. As one of the members of its predecessor, the German Workers' Party, he was a close friend and early ally of Adolf Hitler and a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi Party's militia, and later was its commander. By 1934, the German Army feared the SA's influence and Hitler had come to see Röhm as a potential rival, so he was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
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The Bavarian or Munich Soviet Republic was a short-lived unrecognised socialist state in Bavaria during the German Revolution of 1918–19. It took the form of a workers' council republic. Its name is also rendered in English as the Bavarian Council Republic; the German term Räterepublik means a republic of councils or committees: council or committee is also the meaning of the Russian word soviet. It was established in April 1919 after the demise of Kurt Eisner's People's State of Bavaria and sought to establish a socialist soviet republic in Bavaria. It was overthrown less than a month later by elements of the German Army and the paramilitary Freikorps. Its collapse helped the Nazi party in its subsequent rise to power.
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Wilfrid Lawson was an English character actor of stage and screen.
I Was Monty's Double is a 1958 film made by Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC). It was directed by John Guillermin. The screenplay was adapted by Bryan Forbes from the autobiography of M. E. Clifton James, an actor who pretended to be General Montgomery as a decoy during the Second World War.
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Events in the year 1899 in Germany.
Events in the year 1933 in Germany.
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The Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration incarcerated clergy who had opposed the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. From December 1940, Berlin ordered the transfer of clerical prisoners held at other camps, and Dachau became the centre for imprisonment of clergymen. Of a total of 2,720 clerics recorded as imprisoned at Dachau some 2,579 were Roman Catholics. Among the other denominations, there were 109 Protestants, 22 Greek Orthodox, 8 Old Catholics and Mariavites and 2 Muslims. Members of the Catholic Society of Jesus (Jesuits) were the largest group among the incarcerated clergy at Dachau.
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