Rent Hold Back the Dawn (1941)

A Case for the Semicolon - Hold Back the Dawn review by CH

Eighty-five years on, the Mexican border, wall and all, might sound topical. Lither, better coiffured, and blessed with a smooth voice and a clothes sense, though, was Charles Boyer. He has holed up in the Hotel Esperanza - great name for a rundown place - with designs on making it to the American side by dint of charming a bus-driving schoolteacher (Olivia de Haviland) into marriage so that he can then divorce her and summon to his side a former dancing partner (a wonderfully cynical Paulette Goddard).

That is the plot but with it comes a joyful cargo of dialogue supplied by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who, miracle of miracles, even manage to celebrate a typewriter whose semicolon key has been so often used that it has fallen off. This must be unique in the annals of punctuation, on screen or otherwise. Comic as all this sounds, the film does not lack for emotion, director Mitchell Leisen keeping up a pace which makes one feel for all concerned as events take a turn not to be revealed here. That Boyer survives is no surprise, for the film - very postmodern - has a prologue in which his character arrives at the Paramount set where the director is at work on his previous film I Wanted Wings with a glimpse of none other than Veronica Lake and tells him that he has a tale to make a great hit.

The only disappointment is that I Wanted Wings is among a number of Leisen's films which have yet to appear on disc. Hold Back the Dawn itself was elusive for too long - take this chance to see it.