BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over again from "Made in Italy" and plays a Nazi officer tonight. I thought about grouping these next six Neeson films in order based on when they were set, which would put the 1930's detective story first, then this World War II film, and then the one set in Ireland in 1974, but it just wouldn't work, I mean it WOULD put the one in Ireland square on St. Patrick's Day, but I can do that no matter what. I think I'll put them in order of release instead, mostly anyway, and then let the chips fall where they may. Again, as long as I end on the right one, it doesn't really matter.
THE PLOT: An American Woman of Irish and Jewish-German parentage goes undercover in Nazi Germany.
AFTER: I have a vague memory of trying to watch this once, a long time ago, like maybe a few years after it came out in 1992, maybe at my aunt and uncle's house (my uncle then, like me now, was a big collector of movies, though he had everything on VHS and I didn't REALLY start collecting until I could burn DVDs. But, same affliction, I guess.) but I really didn't remember anything about it, which leads me to think that I lost interest because I thought the movie was so dumb. Which it is, kind of, like we're supposed to believe that Melanie Griffith was influential in beating the Nazis during World War II, yet she received NONE of the credit for that, just an Oscar nomination for "Working Girl". Seems fair.
Look, you can tell me her character is very smart, you can tell me her character speaks fluent German, you can tell me her character learned a lot about spying from watching movies about spies. But she never really stops being Melanie Griffith, if you know what I mean, and watching Melanie Griffith play a master spy who's thrown into the think of WWII with almost no official training, and it's kind of like watching Kevin Hart play an assassin in "The Man from Toronto", he'll never stop being Kevin Hart, right? So there's where the humor comes in, you've got comic Kevin Hart trying to pretend to be a really tough hitman, and he can't do that well, so it's funny. But the problem HERE is that "Shining Through" is not a comedy, it tried to be a very serious World War II spy film, and Melanie Griffith just feels WAY out of place.
I saw one review that called this film "The best film to ever win the Razzie Award for Best Picture", and yeah, OK, that makes sense because it's not a TERRIBLE film, but it's still completely ridiculous, like you can NOT take this film seriously on any level. Just too many stupid or unlikely things happen, some of them you might say are just good fortune or bad fortune, but the sheer number and magnitude of totally unbelievably things is staggering. For example, Linda Voss is sent undercover to Germany and is expected to get a job as a cook for a Nazi officer. We're led to believe that since she was raised by a German father, she can speak fluent German even though she hasn't been back there in decades (NITPICK POINT #1) but OK. She gets hired quickly WITHOUT a background check done by the Gestapo because another agent hit the officer's cook with a truck and injured him, and there's no time before the big officer's dinner, so they have to hire someone on the fly. (NITPICK POINT #2). Then Linda doesn't know that cucumber soup is supposed to be served cold, so she serves it hot, then she doesn't have time to cook the doves (squabs?) so she says, "Oh, we'll serve them cold...") (NITPICK POINT #3, any cook anywhere would know you have to cook any fowl.). Then when the dinner guests are served raw birds, they eat them anyway because the commander says they are fine, and nobody wants to disagree with him, and then nobody gets sick afterwards (NITPICK POINT #4).
She's fired from the cook position, which is the ONLY part of this scene that makes sense, and then another officer picks her up as she's walking away from the job, because he needs a nanny for his children, and naturally he assumes she's been checked out by the Gestapo, so he doesn't bother himself (HUGE NITPICK POINT #5, and it simply does NOT excuse the previous four. Story-wise, the ends do not justify the means of getting there.)
The whole film is really like THAT, there's a lot of back and forth and contradicting information about how spies work, and how easy it is to get somebody into Nazi Germany and also how easy it is to get someone out, provided you meet the right person in the right abandoned warehouse and catch the 5:30 train out of Berlin, and if you miss that, you're stranded behind enemy lines forever. Oh, except you can get a message out if you visit the right fish store which is two hours away from where you're working and you go on a Tuesday and ask the afternoon guy if fresh cod is in season. Wow, it's a brilliant code that no German will ever crack unless of course they like codfish. How stupid is that?
Her boss is a colonel at the OSS, but he spent the first year of the war cleverly disguised as an attorney at a minor law firm who frequently takes trips to Switzerland to visit his non-existent wife who's supposedly in a mental hospital there, which makes zero sense on every level, to the point where Linda figures out he's a spy within the first week of working for him. She also figures out that his dictated nonsense letters are a form of code, and that they get transmitted by radio, because he never asks her to type up envelopes to mail them. Jeez, either he's the stupidest spy ever or she's the smartest non-spy ever, maybe a little of both.
They fall into bed together, and naturally she assumes that they'll stay together forever, as long as the U.S. doesn't do something stupid like enter World War II. Yeah, about that... They get separated, she ends up working in the basement of women analyzing German communications and intelligence and he gets sent to Europe, where he finds another female translator to spend his days (and nights) with. When he returns with another pretty girl on his arm, she's so heartbroken that she volunteers for undercover work, which really feels like a non-logical leap. Oh, yeah, but she's got Jewish family hiding in Germany that she wants to check on, and she can only do that if she goes to Germany, pretends to be a German cook, and finds some Nazi officer's secret room in his house where he keeps all the secret plans of the entire Third Reich, which she can then take pictures of and then figure out a way to get back with that microfilm.
Well, that was the plan, anyway, before she screwed up that dinner in a plot twist stolen from an episode of "Fawlty Towers". She takes that nanny job instead, and she finds the other officer's secret basement storage room with all the secret plans of the Third Reich in it, thank god she still has her spy camera and an unexposed roll of microfilm. But her cover almost gets blown when a famous pianist recognizes her at the opera, and falsely claims that she went to university with her daughter. Suddenly the Nazi officer wonders why his nanny would have a college education, and he's on to her. She has to escape and try to get out of Germany, so she heads back to the home of the agent who trained her, only to learn that agent has been secretly working for the Germans all along - which is NITPICK POINT #6, another thing that doesn't make any sense, if she was German why did she help the U.S. train an undercover agent and then never blow her cover?
Her old boyfriend/boss Ed Leland shows up with another operative, and despite the fact that Linda's been shot twice while evading capture, they still want to put her on that train to Switzerland - but no, don't get her medical help or stop the bleeding or anything like that, just get her on the train. And this is the guy who defiantly refused to learn to speak any German, thinking that faking a throat injury would be enough of a cover to get by, well that and his fake Nazi officer uniform. Umm, it's not, so he gets all shot up trying to get Linda's unconscious body over the magical line that is the Swiss border. Give me a god damn break. Do you really think that the Nazi snipers will stop firing the SECOND you cross that very visible line on the ground? Their bullets aren't stopped by that line, you know, they're probably going to keep shooting.
Reportedly, this film spent $500,000 to erect a building in Berlin that was going to be blown up during an action scene. However, no cameras were rolling when they blew up the building, and based on how disjointed this whole film is, I believe this tale. Nothing here really makes much sense, so it simultaneously could be a great film if you don't think about things too much, or a terrible film if you do. Supposedly the book this was based on was better, but they cut out about 3/4 of that story when they made it into a film.
Directed by David Seltzer (writer of "Dragonfly" and "Cinema Verite")
Also starring Michael Douglas (last seen in "Coma"), Melanie Griffith (last seen in "The High Note"), Joely Richardson (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), John Gielgud (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady"), Francis Guinan (last seen in "All Good Things"), Anthony Walters, Victoria Shalet, Sheila Allen (last seen in "Love Actually"), Stanley Beard, Sylvia Syms (last heard in "Billie"), Ronald Nitschke, Hansi Jochmann, Mathieu Carriere, William Hope (last seen in "The Son"), Constanze Engelbrecht, Ludwig Haas, Wolf Kahler (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Patrick Winczewski, Peter Flechtner (last seen in "Schindler's List"), Alexander Hauff, Claus Plänkers, Renate Cyll, Dana Gladstone (last seen in "The Star Chamber"), Lorinne Vozoff, Deirdre Harrison (last seen in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), Wolfe Morris, Jay Benedict (last seen in "Moonwalkers"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Klaus Munster, Clement von Franckenstein (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Lorelei King (last heard in "Alien: Covenant"), Hans-Martin Stier (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), Wolfgang Heger, Michael Gempart, Hana Maria Pravda, Steve Emerson, Lucien Morgan (last seen in "Lassiter") with archive footage of James Stewart
RATING: 4 out of 10 requests for "papers" to be shown
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