In Our Time (1944)

As war clouds hover over Europe in 1939, a young Englishwoman (Ida Lupino) is traveling in Poland with her employer (Mary Boland), an interior decorator buying antiques. When she meets a handsome Polish Count (Paul Henreid),  they fall in love and marry despite the extreme reservations of his class conscious family. Directed by  the veteran Vincent Sherman (MR. SKEFFINGTON), this mixture of romance and propaganda film is too ambitious for its own good. Trying to cram in too much in a two hour running time, it ends up being unsatisfactory as both a romance and as a talky moral boost to the war effort, most notably sympathy for Poland's fight for freedom against the Nazis. Lupino is curiously sexless, perhaps rendered so by the lack of chemistry between her and Henreid. The first part of the film is rather enjoyable in its own faux REBECCA way with Lupino as the shy companion to a vulgarian (Boland) rescued by a handsome aristocrat (Henreid) but that all quickly evaporates when the Nazis invade Warsaw. This kind of thing has been done better, WATCH ON THE RHINE comes to mind. With Alla Nazimova, Nancy Coleman, Michael Chekhov and Victor Francen.