The Scarlet and the Black

The Scarlet and the Black (1983) is a wartime drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Jerry London. Gregory Peck plays Father Hugh O'Flaherty, an Irish Vatican official who spent two years sheltering downed Allied airmen, escaped prisoners of war, and Italian resistance families inside Rome — while the Gestapo was hunting him. Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud co-star.

Based on J.P. Gallagher's account of O'Flaherty's actual operation in Rome, 1943–1945. By the time German command decided he had to be removed, more than a thousand people had already passed through his network. The constraint: they could only reach him outside Vatican City. He knew. He kept going.

What carries the film is the duel at its centre — Peck's stubborn, unhurried O'Flaherty against Plummer's precise German colonel. No combat sequences, no spectacle. Two men, a line on a map, and thousands of lives determined by which one blinks first. Stream The Scarlet and the Black (1983) online on iFILM.