Synopsis
Watch on the Rhine (1943) is a Hollywood anti-fascist drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Herman Shumlin from Lillian Hellman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play. Bette Davis and Paul Lukas headline the cast in one of the few American films made during the war that confronts Nazi Germany without abstraction.
German-born Kurt Müller arrives in Washington with his American wife Sara and their three children after nearly two decades abroad. It reads as a homecoming visit to Sara's wealthy mother. Kurt is carrying a suitcase full of money for the resistance — and that detail reaches the wrong ears. A Romanian count staying in the house sees leverage and begins to move on it. The domestic warmth of the opening turns cold quickly.
Paul Lukas won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this performance, and it holds up — controlled, weary, quietly determined. The film was made before anyone knew how the war would end, and that tension is baked into every scene. Watch Watch on the Rhine (1943) online on iFILM.
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