Based on a 1955 novel by Rupert Croft-Cooke (whose original title is part of a quotation from the Book of Revelations). One goes into this film expecting a resistance drama, but the presence of Ma Huggett herself - Kathleen Harrison - completes the parallels with 'Holiday Camp' ten years earlier, in which various lives intertwine - some of them fatally - with a serial killer within their midst; this time in the teeming slums of wartime Marseilles.
In 'Holiday Camp' Dennis Price was a thinly disguised Neville Heath. Here James Robertson Justice is cast against type with a French accent and a wing collar as France's most notorious serial killer since Landru, Dr. Marcel Petiot; who was guillotined in 1946 for the nefarious activities that provides one of the plot threads in what is otherwise a rather light-hearted take on the Occupation (garnished with an appropriately fanciful score by Anthony Hopkins). Hence the grittier title for it's American release.
In 'Holiday Camp' Dennis Price was a thinly disguised Neville Heath. Here James Robertson Justice is cast against type with a French accent and a wing collar as France's most notorious serial killer since Landru, Dr. Marcel Petiot; who was guillotined in 1946 for the nefarious activities that provides one of the plot threads in what is otherwise a rather light-hearted take on the Occupation (garnished with an appropriately fanciful score by Anthony Hopkins). Hence the grittier title for it's American release.