Bon Voyage (1944 film)
| Bon Voyage | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Written by |
Angus MacPhail J.O.C. Orton |
| Story by | Arthur Calder-Marshall |
| Starring | John Blythe |
| Music by | Benjamin Frankel |
| Cinematography | Günther Krampf |
| Distributed by | Milestone Films |
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Release date
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Running time
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26 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | French |
Bon Voyage (1944) is a short French language propaganda film made by Alfred Hitchcock for the British Ministry of Information. Although the film is short (26 minutes), it is interesting for its use of two radically different interpretations of the same events, a technique not unlike that used by Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon (1950), Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line (1988), and Fernando Meirelles in Cidade de Deus (2002).
Hitchcock had offered his services to the British government after his former producer in the UK, Michael Balcon, made a statement about overweight British directors who had left the country for Hollywood "while we who are left behind short-handed are trying to harness the films to our great national effort." Later, Hitchcock told François Truffaut "I felt the need to make a little contribution to the war effort, and I was both overweight and overage for military service. I knew that if I did nothing I'd regret it for the rest of my life; it was important to me to do something and also to get right into the atmosphere of war." Hitchcock soon began development of Bon Voyage, which he described as "a little story about an RAF man who is being escorted out of France through the Resistance channels. His escort was a Polish officer. When he arrives in London, the RAF man is interrogated by an officer of the Free French Forces, who informs him that his Polish escort was really a Gestapo man. Upon that startling revelation, we go through the journey across France all over again, but this time we show all sorts of details that the young RAF man hadn't noticed at first, various indications of the Pole's complicity with the Gestapo detail. At the end of the story there was a twist showing how the Polish officer had been trapped. At the same time, the RAF man learned that the young French girl who'd helped them, and had spotted the Pole as a spy, had been killed by him."
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