Review of Reunion in France

Reunion in France is excruciating to listen to because of the lame attempts at German, French and British accents and the pathetic pronunciations of German and French names and words. It begins with a speech by a "French" general in which the American actor playing him can barely restrain his southern accent (I expected him at any minute to say y'all). I understand that there probably was a shortage of German and French actors in Hollywood at the time. But surely there were actors who could do believable foreign accents? Several times "Germans" speak several sentences in German and the pronunciation is so bad that it comes off as gobbledygook.

The film is a heavy-handed propaganda piece: The Germans are fat and coarse. The French are noble and self-sacrificing. They lost the war not because of poor planning, insufficient defenses and inept military and political decisions, but because France was "betrayed." It's all a bit overblown and accompanied by stabs of dramatic background music.

It's always interesting to see John Wayne in an early, non-western role. In this film, however, he seems unnecessary and the film slows down drastically once he arrives. If he was intended to be the patriotic opposite of the Nazi sympathizer character and the second man in a love triangle, he arrives in the film too late to register strongly as either.