Green For Danger

Green For Danger (1945)
a film by Sydney Gilliat

Set in the last days of the World War II, Green For Danger is an entertaining thriller and a successful cocktail made with the intrigue of the relationships between the doctors and nurses in a hospital, the life in the English Home Front, a mysterious crime story and considerable amounts of dark humour.

Green For Danger has been another one of the great discoveries brought by The List. This short and refreshing films brings a Hitchcockian crime story with a little bit of romantic intrigue nicely set by the great cast and sparkled with the dose of dark humour provided by a clumsy but very proud detective that is both an omniscient narrator and a character in the story.

This is a movie made in the last year of WWII but touches topics that might have been very sensitive for the audiences of the time and that are greatly preserved thank to the success of this story. The English Home Front, the campaign hospitals and the terrible menace of the terrible V1 rockets frame this thriller. On the other hand it also features interesting characters greatly interpreted that set the tempestuous background for the story, I particularly enjoyed Dr. Adan and the elegant and independent nurse Linley.

A movie like Green For Danger is a document of their time. It preserves the elements of the life and its problems in its time but it is the great success in the mixture of cast, story and context what makes it accessible and entertaining more than sixty years later and will make it linger in time.