ODETTE no stars

Only the team of Herbert Wilcox, (producer and director), and Anna Neagle, (his actress wife), could take a story like "Odette" and make something as dull as this. Odette Sansom was a British agent working in Nazi occupied France so the potential for excitement and drama was evident but everyone connected to the film pussyfoots around the issues it raises and treats Odette as if she was the Virgin Mary. Of course, Neagle was never a serious actress to start with and throughout behaves as if she had done nothing more than spill something on her dress at a Royal Garden Party, her stiff upper lip hardly quivering at all while actors as fine as Trevor Howard and Peter Ustinov can do nothing with the leaden material they have to work with, (only Marius Goring goes some way to lifting the film out of the doldrums), and the whole thing drags on for two hours. Odette's story should have been both moving and inspiring and with a better writer, a better director and a better actress it might have been but this half-hearted attempt by the British Establishment to honour a genuine heroine simply falls flat.