"Pastor Hall" is a bold, very early attempt to expose the Nazi regime. Halliwell's Film Guide gives the film a measly one star rating, which only goes to prove one should not believe everything one reads in print. It is, as Halliwell says, a "courageous film of its time" but in direct opposition to Halliwell, it is VERY interesting dramatically. Cinematically, the film works and considering budget constraints, it is an admirable production for 1939 (released 1940). It is also a great example of British film making for the period.

It's greatest flaw is arguably the upper class English accents. An interesting thing happens once one is drawn into the film, however: because the accents are a constant, it becomes a dramatic convention that one accepts. In other words, it does not detract from the dramatic impact of the social statement that the film makes. It also lends the film a timeless quality to the moral values it underlines - making the film surprisingly relevant for the 21st century viewer.

Historically, it a very important film. Made before the full horrors of the concentration camps were known, "Pastor Hall" is the first film to deal with the issue of the Nazi concentration camps. Fortunatley, I have a copy that I taped off air several years ago, and the image quality is better than a lot of digital transfers I've seen.

This film should be revived. I'd run "Pastor Hall" as a main feature, and run Alain Resnais' stark 1955 documentary masterpiece, "Nuit Et Brouillard" (Night and Fog) right afterwards. Both films should be required viewing for the film student.

• If you found this 'mini-review' helpful, then please checkout my full length IMDb reviews, written for post-viewing discussion with live audiences. This postscript added 21st June 2006.

Although the title role of Pastor Hall is played by Wilfrid Lawson, and he is undoubtedly the star of this film, he gets billing below both Nova Pilbeam and Sir Seymour Hicks, but above Marius Goring, in the credits. Unfair it may be, but everyone is so good in this film that it rather precludes any attempt to fight for star billing for a particular performer. Many years back, someone who knew about such things (it may have been Olivier) called Wilfrid Lawson the supreme British character actor of his time. It is almost impossible to look at him as the almost beatific Pastor Hall and quite believe that only one year earlier he had played (better than anyone else, ever) the highly disreputable father of Eliza Doolittle in the Leslie Howard-Wendy Hiller "Pygmalion" and a rather sinister fellow in "The Terror". While his turn in "Pygmalion" is probably his most famous film performance (and he was on screen from 1931 through his death in 1966),his Pastor Hall is probably the best thing he ever did on the screen. The other actors are his equal in all but the difficulty of the roles assigned to them. A grown up Nova Pilbeam, who is best remembered for her teenage performances in two Hitchcock films ("The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "Young and Innocent") gives what is surely her best performance in her somewhat aborted film career (seventeen films in nineteen years) as the pastor's very intelligent and brave daughter, and the venerable and quite legendary Sir Seymour Hicks as an old retired General is suitably huffy, puffy and good-humored throughout, but is incredibly moving in the tear-inducing final moment of his performance. Marius Goring, who was wonderful as cold-hearted villains, mentally unstable young men, good-hearted leading men and ineffectual weaklings (rather like a British Richard Basehart) is at his coldest here as the leader of a Storm Trooper brigade assigned to bring the town in which he is stationed into line with National Socialist policies. He is such a superb actor that, although he remains totally villainous throughout the film, we see the facade of his villainy wilt for a furtive moment when receiving a much-deserved tongue-lashing from Pastor Hall in front of the Pastor's fellow concentration camp inmates. Only great film actors can make a moment like that tell the way it does here. There is also a young Bernard Miles (later Lord Miles),very moving as a Storm Trooper guard at the concentration camp who had known Pastor Hall in better days. But there simply isn't a role in the film that isn't beautifully handled. Indeed, in its own way it is as perfectly cast as "Casablanca" was a few years later. And, if anyone has a problem with the British accents, at least everyone in the film has the same one, and no one ever complained about such things when Alexander Knox or John Carradine played villainous-but-unaccented Germans in American wartime films (and let us not forget that, in a total hodgepodge of accents in "Casablanca", Claude Rains, not eschewing his glorious British heritage for a moment, played to perfection the very French Captain Renault with the most wonderful British accent to be heard short of hiring John Gielgud for the part). Anyhow, if I have seen any film in the past year that is more unjustly forgotten than "Pastor Hall", I can't recall it; but even if the picture were less worthy than I think it is, it would still be worth viewing just for the wonderful actors doing some of their very best work in it.

Pastor Hall is an excellent film, about a subject that really hasn't been covered all that much. Most films about the Nazis and what they did usually showcase the horrific slaughter and aftermath of Teutonic aggression. The audience may watch at a distance as the horrible German monsters either commit genocide or stand idly by and watch others do so. That's a nice comfortable perspective which leaves the viewer questioning how the people of an entire country could be so heartless, cruel and twisted. What's wrong with the Germans? Why aren't they good and kind like us? This movie (perhaps unwittingly) answers those questions somewhat. It gives us a very different perspective, as we are invited to see average, work-a-day German people encountering the rise of totalitarianism, one step at a time, one bullying at a time, one disappearance at a time, and one murder at a time, close to the beginning of the rise of the Nazis. I was a little shocked that a movie from 1939/40 would cover such topics as sexual intimidation and teen pregnancy. Even abortion is alluded to as a longed-for option denied by the regime. I'm sure the film buffs will pull out a list of other films of this period that also mention these things, but I wonder if other films have handled these subjects with as much sensitivity and strength as is shown here. Absolutely top notch acting from all concerned. Marius Goring is great as always, showing us a storm-trooper leader that seems at first to be an awkward, stiff young man embarrassing himself in front of a girl, then later appearing as a cunning, cold, lecherous pig manipulating for her submission (and everyone else's) and ending up revealing a somewhat cowardly, almost comically ineffectual dupe. Wilfrid Lawson is truly amazing as the title character. Why isn't he more well known? The scene where he denounces Hitler is one of the most memorable on film. More people should have the chance to see this movie, just for that scene. All that being said, Bernard Miles would have stolen this film had he been given more lines. He's really the "every-Nazi" in this thing, starting out as a man just thrilled to have a job as a storm-trooper after being out of work in the terrible economy after WWI, like so many others. When we next see him, he looks like a man pondering where he went wrong, as he abuses the one man he respects above all others, because he wears the swastika and its his job. Later on, when he breaks at the cruelty he witnesses, he shows us a very human man in a Nazi uniform, crying and repenting and reforming. He does a lot with a paltry few lines. It's true that this film was made as propaganda, and to relate the interesting story of one very brave man's life. It ends up transcending that purpose, going far beyond Nazis and Jews and WWII, showing us the step by step process by which faith, morality, kindness, generosity and individuality are broken down by terror in the face of cruelty. The use of intimidation and physical violence to gain control is a tried and true method that can always be pulled out and used again, anywhere, at any time, and all of us are vulnerable to its effects. This film's lasting importance is that it reminds us that we could all have easily been wearing those swastikas, were we born in another time and place, and that we must pay attention to what is going on around us, and fight injustice and tyranny whenever we spot it.