Pastor Hall

9/7/2022

This is quite a gruelling film to watch, this one. Wilfrid Lawson is the eponymous minister who lived in a small German village in the 1930s as the Nazi party started on it's inevitable route to power. A decent man, he tried to resist the increasingly anti-semitic aspirations of the Party but with the arrival of some stormtroopers under the command of the malevolent, but cunning, "Gerte" (Marius Goring) his task becomes much harder and his own safety, and that of his young daughter "Christine" (Nova Pilbeam) looks more and more precarious. It's based on a true character, and the story has an authenticity to it that papers over the cracks left by the limitations of an early wartime production with what I assume was a modest budget. Lawson is very effective in the title role, as are Goring a