I just came across this film and watched it yesterday. I had never heard of it before and decided to give it a try. I found it an eerie and haunting little film with a very powerful message. An ordinary American businessman is on a holiday camping, hunting and fishing in the forest. When he goes home afterwards he finds that his city has been taken over and is now run by Nazis. He is arrested and beaten and told by the head Nazi, "this is our America now."
Considering what happened last week, when a huge crowd broke into the Capitol in Washington DC in an attempt to prevent Joe Biden from becoming the new President of the USA, this film that is three-quarters of a century old shows that it is still scarily relevant.
At the end the prisoner John Stevenson is seen holding the bars of his jail cell and saying, "freedom is not a gift, it is a victory." What a timely reminder that freedom has to be protected, even fought for, or it could be taken away from us. Claude Rains has to carry the film and he does so excellently. Most people probably don't know this film but it deserves to be widely known because its message is urgently in need of being heard. Anyone who values democracy will be haunted by what it shows and what it says. Only 75 minutes long but it packs a punch! I recommend this to anyone and all the more so in our present situation.
