Prismark10
Unpublished Story is a propaganda piece with almost a documentary type setting in parts when it shows the effects of the Nazi bombings on Londoners.Bob Randall (Richard Greene) and Carole Bennett (Valerie Hobson) are journalists investigating a pacifist group called People For Peace. The group is in effect taken over by Nazi fifth columnists to spread misinformation that resistance is futile.Basil Radford plays Lamb, the man from the ministry with the habit to spike any news story not in the national interest.It is an intriguing look at the peace movement at the time and the government at the time would had been aware that some unsavoury types would attempt to hijack such groups.The film is rather uneven, you see brutal effects of the bombings but this is mixed with humour which sits rather inappropriately. The story of the secret Nazi infiltrators is not well told and at times appears confusing with little action regarding the main plot.
Richard Chatten
The British wartime authorities' perennial obsession with fifth columnists ('enemy agents' were serving as baddies as early as the 1940 George Formby vehicle 'Let George Do It!') here finds elaborate expression in an ambitious production set in London during the Blitz. It took five credited writers to concoct this frequently hard to follow propaganda piece in which actual footage from the Blitz is adroitly combined with recreated studio footage. Censorship is benignly depicted as an essential part of the war effort (hence the title), while a pacifist organisation called 'People for Peace' is revealed to be not simply a Nazi front organisation run by British reactionaries but headed by authentic German 'sleepers' who privately converse among themselves in German. (With acts of terrorism in Europe by refugees from the Middle East now becoming almost everyday occurrences, the sequence depicting the arrival of a German agent masquerading as a Belgian refugee has disturbing contemporary resonances.)Richard Greene and Valerie Hobson are colourless leads, and dependable supporting actors like Basil Radford, Roland Culver and André Morell are generally given remarkably little to do; with the notable exception of Brefni O'Rorke as the editor of 'The Gazette', the newspaper the plot revolves around, who gets to deliver the film's stirring final speech at the fadeout.
mark.waltz
That is the motive of British correspondents Valarie Hobson and Richard Greene in this newspaper war drama about the revelation that a supposed group of protesters for peace are actually a front for Nazi spies trying to stir up trouble in England. This takes place during the London blitz when nightly raids and bunkers for the protection of the people still out on the streets during an air raid was a regular occurrence. The blitz scenes are extremely realistic, especially one when Greene rescues Hobson from a phone booth while a nearby building is about to collapse. Basil Radford is excellent as a speaker of the peace convention who learns the truth about his leaders a bit too late. The cinema warned us about the enemy in our own camps many times on-screen, whether through newspaper dramas like this or the adventures of a gambler in "All Through the Night".
ksf-2
One of the films made by Two Cities Films in the 1940s and 1950s, this is a mostly, well-done story of newspaper reporters running into fifth-columnists within their midst in Britain during WW II. The editor of the paper and some other characters say some silly lines, but they can be overlooked. Richard Greene, Valerie Hobson, and Basil Radford star in this predictable spy thriller, showing the realities of bombed out London, although much of it is a background screen projection. The plot brings up the usual "Do we fight back or acquiesce?" wartime debate.Hobson had played Elizabeth in Bride of Frankenstein with the master B. Karloff in 1935. Greene was Sir Henry Baskerville opposite Basil Rathbone prior to "Unpublished...", and would later play Robin Hood in the British TV series for several years. Two Cities Films was part by the Rank Organization, which made films for many years. The Rank Organization would later be turned into a casino operator, which is still operating as a public company in England. Another interesting tidbit is Hobson's marriage to producer/writer Anthoney Havelock-Allen; she appears to have met and married him in 1939, and made nine films together. Sadly, they divorced in 1952, and she only made a couple more films after that...