Director/Screenplay – Arch Oboler, Based on His Radio Play The Precious Freedom, Producers – Edward Finney & A.W. Hackel, Photography (b&w) – Robert Surtees, Art Direction – Bernard Herzbrun. Production Company – Elite Pictures.
Cast
Claude Rains (John Stevenson), Gloria Holden (Jean Stevenson), Milton Kibbee (Sam Morgan), Martin Kosleck (Examiner), Bobbie Stebbins (John Stevenson, Jr), Barbara Bate (Peggy Lee Stevenson), Paul Hilton (Woodrow Stevenson, Jr.), Wally Maher (Truck Driver), Walter White, Jr. (Farmer), Griff Barnett (Regan), Helen Mack (Miss Sims)
Plot
John Stevenson leaves his wife Jean and three children and goes on a fishing vacation in the North Woods with a friend for several weeks. After flying back to town, John finds everything has changed – people are afraid and uncommunicative, while businesses, including the one he works for, have been closed down. John is then arrested. He discovers that while he has been away a Nazi sympathiser government made up of fifth column infiltrators has taken over the USA and suspended all civil rights.
Arch Oboler (1909-87) gained a name for his work on radio, beginning as producer/writer and creator of the celebrated horror anthology series Lights Out (1934-57). Based on the acclaim he gained there, Oboler began to expand onto film, beginning with the script for the thriller Escape (1940), one of the first screen depictions of a concentration camp. He made his directorial debut with Strange Holiday and went on to make a total of seven films as director, most of which fall into genre territory. These include the split personality film Bewitched (1945); Five (1951), the very first screen depiction of nuclear war and its aftermath; The Twonky (1953), a comedy about a tv set that gains a life of its own; and the alien invasion film The Bubble (1966). Perhaps the most influential of Oboler’s films in retrospect was the non-genre hit of the African adventure Bwana Devil (1952), which was the very first feature film made in 3D.
There is a whole sub-genre of science-fiction that deals with invasion fantasies. This seemed particularly prevalent in the 19th Century literature, following the success of the novel The Battle of Dorking (1871) by George T. Chesney, which imagined the invasions of England by an unnamed German-speaking country. A number of other such terrestrial invasion stories came out around during this period, before H.G. Wells spectacularly reimagined the invaders as aliens in The War of the Worlds (1898). Sporadic other terrestrial invasion stories have appeared subsequently. They are always representative of nationalistic fears of the particular social age – The Battle of Dorking was written by a British general, for instance, and warned of British military complacency against a German attack.
On screen, we have seen occasional terrestrial invasion efforts. The 1950s brought The Whip Hand (1951) with a Communist fifth column planning an invasion, while Rocket Attack U.S.A. (1958) argued the need for a strong missile defence against the Communist threat. The most direct effort during this period was Invasion USA (1952), which imagined a Communist invasion and nuclear attack on the US. Several years later, the genre was revived with Red Dawn (1984), which had teens conducting guerrilla warfare following a Soviet military invasion and Invasion U.S.A. (1985) which had Chuck Norris singlehandedly fighting off a Communist invasion. The genre continues in occasional films such as Tomorrow When the War Began (2010) and How I Live Now (2013), not to mention the remake of Red Dawn (2012), which bizarrely tried to convince us that the US was being invaded by North Korea.
(l to r) Claude Rains is arrested by Nazi agents Martin Kosleck and Milton Kibbee
The first of these invasion films was Strange Holiday here. The film came out right at the end of World War II – Germany surrendered on May 6, 1945; Strange Holiday premiered either in January or October of that year (the IMDB lists differing dates). In actuality though, the film was made before the US had even entered World War II. Arch Oboler had been hired by General Motors to make the film to inspire their workers to take a more patriotic outlook towards the war going on in Europe. However, after seeing Oboler’s more politicised views, they elected to shelve the film. It was sold to MGM who gave it the same treatment until Oboler arranged to have it released through the independent Elite Pictures (the only film that Elite seem to have ever released) by which time the war was at an end. This offers the intriguing notion that the film’s premise of a Nazi fifth column invading the USA was made while World War II was ongoing but before the USA had even entered the war effort. Certainly, it is a film very much informed by rampant fears of Nazism and the belief that the Nazis had created a fifth column to infiltrate and take over US government.
Strange Holiday doesn’t exactly have a plausible premise – Claude Rains goes away for a few weeks on a fishing vacation and returns to find the entire government overthrown by Nazis. First of all, it is a hard swallow in this day and age that an average working man can just take ‘a few weeks’ off from work.
The other issue that it is not specified how the Nazis took over – via an election? a revolution? It does seem an amazingly abrupt and orderly transition within the space of only a few weeks. Even if it were an election, the change and shut down of businesses, the populace turning fearful and paranoid seems to happen with almost instantaneous effect whereas in reality you would expect ripples, resistance and the need to pass some kind of nominal legislation. Unlike Invasion U.SA. and Red Dawn, Arch Oboler never figures out much of what to do once he has his premise set up – these others have the protagonists joining a resistance movement, whereas all that happens here is that Claude Rains is thrown into a jail cell.
