Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

so disappointing. I'm a fan of war and spy movies and i was so anxious to see this one. I bought it and after 30 minutes of watching i shook my head and said....what a disaster. The acting is bad and all cast seem to throw out their lines to get get home as quick as possible. James Stewart is bland and margaret sullivan acts like a puppet on a string. the story line could have been interesting but was going all directions we see Granville for 5 minutes.......M organ doesn't come back...YET we see endless close up of fake skiing...and that seems to last for an eternity. Gave it a 2...for Frank Morgan....and beautiful mountains. WHAT a simply poor waste of time.

This is a surprisingly modern and almost shockingly valid film still today after 75 years, since all the arguments are as important today as in 1940 and perhaps even more so than ever. It's about the transience from a democracy to an autocracy, how it changes the very core of society and plunges people into an entirely different mentality turning many of them into aliens and forcing them into exile, if they want to escape the brainwash. It's an upsetting story extremely efficiently told with marvellous photography, especially in the final scenes way up in the Alps, and it's a joy to see James Stewart so young and fresh and completely himself in total honesty. Margaret Sullavan has done better in other films, especially "Three Comrades" two years earlier, another German story on a novel by Remarque, but no one is falling short of perfect. Frank Borzage's direction celebrates perhaps its greatest triumphs in this vitally important film so much ahead of its time, since it clearly sees through all what Germany actually was about long before America entered the war. This is actually a timelessly important film unmasking the very essence of autocracy as a very efficient warning against it for all times - it could be about any autocracy. Perhaps it's a little dramatized and exaggerated, it all happens in 1933 while it's still winter, while it really depicts the whole development in Germany up till 1939, but that's a minor detail, and the film would have been less efficient without the exaggerations - the message is the important thing, and it remains a vitally important one for all ages.

Frank Morgan (Professor Roth) is a respected German Scientist/Biology Lecturer. The film starts on his 60th birthday in 1933 – the same day that Adolf Hitler assumes the Chancellorship of Germany. Uh-oh…. Maybe things won't be the same.This film entertains as it shows the bullying power (Nazis) that can be very scary – in any walk of life. The satisfaction comes from the fight back, in this film, led by James Stewart (Martin Breitner) and his mother Maria Ouspenskaya (Mrs Breitner).A scene that stands out for me is the mock wedding that is staged by Ouspenskaya as she unites her son, James Stewart, and his wife-to-be Margaret Sullavan (Freya) at her home before the two lovers embark upon their escape. The scene is played with sentimentality at first that may make you feel that you are embarking upon some kind of nonsense…until you realize that this is Ouspenskaya's last moment that she can share in happiness. Very touching.What is interesting is this film as a document of a time gone by with how things were in Nazi times. There will always be suppression in some form across the globe. I felt that the film delivers a standard ending, however, but the tears should be saved for Maria Ouspa and her fate.

This is like the ABCs of Naziism. In 1933 Germany there is this perfect family headed by a beloved, elderly professor of physiology, Frank Morgan (the wizard of Oz). His wife is devoted to him and their children, two young men and a girl, Margaret Sullavan. On the old fellow's 60th birthday he is given a tribute in his classroom by two of his students, the medical student Robert Young, and the veterinarian James Stewart. Both of them are in love with Sullavan but Young is the more assertive of the two and seems to be winning her heart.That night, at dinner, the prof is presented with a birthday cake and the family and guests, including Young and Stewart, applaud when he blows out the candles.The dinner is interrupted by the radio announcement that Hitler has been appointed chancellor. The festive group creaks for a few moments and then falls apart. Young and the prof's two sons cheer. Germany will now be renewed and the so-called pacifists quieted. The professor himself looks thoughtful. Stewart is patently disappointed. The women voice no opinion but seem worried. Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen.Overnight -- and I mean RIGHT AWAY -- Robert Young and the prof's two sons begin wearing Nazi uniforms and acting like robots. They denounce the Roth family and Stewart while standing at attention and addressing the walls. They are organized by Gauleiter Dan Dailey, if you can imagine Dan Dailey as a sneering Nazi.What follows is a kind of Kindergarten lesson on how Fascism works. You must be of Aryan descent to be free of harassment, naturally, and you must be politically correct. Otherwise you are either jailed like the professor, who has been teaching that there are no differences between Aryan and non-Aryan blood, or else you are beaten and finally driven into exile like the dissident Stewart. One by one, the political demands destroy the affectionate world we were introduced to. Stewart and Sullavan try to make their escape over the mountains into Austria, not anticipating that it will be only a temporary haven.It's a Classic Comic version of the rise of Naziism, boiled down to its value-laden essence. The story doesn't try to explain the nationalistic appeal of Hitler. There's nothing about the resentment and humiliation of the treaty ending World War I. There's nothing about the reparations Germany paid or the explosive inflation that followed. There are virtually no thoughtful conversations about anything. The comic book characters seem to speak in little balloons over their heads.Yet I think it's a valuable movie. For one thing, there are some gorgeous second-unit shots of mountains under a silvery sheen of snow, stippled with dark evergreens. The final scene, in which we hear Robert Young's boots echoing forlornly in the empty house, is pregnant with loss. For another, the evolution of social relationships lends the movie some poignancy. For another, I honestly believe that this will provide a necessary history lesson for people, mostly youngsters, whose curiosity doesn't extend beyond their own body sheaths. Years ago, Barbara Tuchman gave a lecture on the causes of World War I at a famous Midwestern university and one of the students thanked her, adding that he'd always wondered why the other was called World War II. (That's at a university, not a home for the cognitively challenged.) For another thing, it helps put our current Zeitgeist into the perspective it so desperately cries out for. We're throwing around words like "Fascism" and I doubt that half those using it could define it. And -- isn't it terrible to throw this lovable old professor in jail because the science he teaches is politically incorrect, discordant with what a certain segment of the population wants to hear? "Creationism," anyone? Or will you have "evolutionary theory?" I watched it all the way through, despite its dated qualities, wishing that everyone under the age of, say, fifty could sit through it. This is how bad it can get.