Réunion en France

Reunion in France finds Joan Crawford as an upper class French woman happily engaged to industrialist Philip Dorn and confident that the French army will defend the Maginot Line and the Germans will be defeated once they make a move west. Of course history and the film both tell us it didn't work out that way.

When she arrives back in Paris because she's away in the country when the surrender happens, she finds that the Germans have taken over her house to use as office space, but they've permitted her to occupy one room on the ground level with its own entrance to the street.

That's a minor inconvenience compared to when she learns that her fiancé is collaborating with the Nazis.

Around that time a young flier with the RAF Eagle Squadron, John Wayne, accosts her in the street and gets her to take him in. He's escaped from Nazi custody and looking to get back to Great Britain.

This is a minor film in the credits of both John Wayne and Joan Crawford in there one and only film together. Crawford was being slowly eased out at MGM and she knew it. Still she was a professional if nothing else and gives the role her best. The part called for her to look chic and those Adrian gowns were in play again.

John Wayne doesn't even get into the film until almost 40 minutes into the story. When he does get in, even though he makes a play for Crawford, the Duke has some real problems as Crawford in order to help him has to play up to Dorn and his Nazi friends. It's not the John Wayne we're used to because it really isn't his film.

There's been some criticism by other reviewers that Crawford doesn't sound French. Then again neither does anyone else in the film. The rest of the cast. The cast in fact has a variety of European and American accents, Frenchmen weren't in good supply at that point in Hollywood, either that or they were otherwise committed. Surely Crawford was no more French sounding than Humphrey Bogart in Passage to Marseille.

Albert Basserman is the commanding general in Paris and the fellow who Dorn cultivates. John Carradine may be the best one in the film as the Gestapo agent who knows there's something fishy with Crawford, but can't quite prove it.

Both the Duke and Joan Crawford had better days ahead of them. Still the film is a curiosity and worth a look.