Bon Voyage (1944 film)

rdf:langString Bon Voyage (1944 film)

rdf:langString Bon Voyage

rdf:langString Bon Voyage

rdf:langString United Kingdom

rdf:langString John Blythe

rdf:langString Bon Voyage

rdf:langString J.O.C. Orton

rdf:langString Bon Voyage is a 1944 short French language propaganda film made by Alfred Hitchcock for the British Ministry of Information. Although the film is short (26 minutes), it uses two radically different interpretations of the same events, a technique not unlike that used by Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon (1950), Errol Morris in The Thin Blue Line (1988), and Fernando Meirelles in Cidade de Deus (2002). Hitchcock had offered his services to the British government after his former producer in the UK, Michael Balcon, made a statement about overweight British directors who had left the country for Hollywood "while we who are left behind short-handed are trying to harness the films to our great national effort." Later, Hitchcock told François Truffaut "I felt the need to make a little contribution to the war effort, and I was both overweight and overage for military service. I knew that if I did nothing, I'd regret it for the rest of my life; it was important to me to do something and also to get right into the atmosphere of war." Hitchcock soon began development of Bon Voyage, which he described as "a little story about an RAF man who is being escorted out of France through the Resistance channels. His escort was a Polish officer. When he arrives in London, the RAF man is interrogated by an officer of the Free French Forces, who informs him that his Polish escort was really a Gestapo man. Upon that startling revelation, we go through the journey across France all over again, but this time we show all sorts of details that the young RAF man hadn't noticed at first, various indications of the Pole's complicity with the Gestapo detail. At the end of the story there was a twist showing how the Polish officer had been trapped. At the same time, the RAF man learned that the young French girl who'd helped them, and had spotted the Pole as a spy, had been killed by him." Hitchcock cast John Blythe in the lead role, and the remaining members of the case came from the Molière Players, who had escaped from France after the German invasion, and whose names were not revealed so as to protect their relatives still in France. Bon Voyage was filmed from 20 January to 25 February at Associated British Studios. Hitchcock was paid £10 a week. It is uncertain whether Bon Voyage – which was a disappointment as a propaganda film to the Ministry of Information – was ever shown in Britain or in France. It and Aventure malgache were shelved by the Ministry and were not seen again until the 1990s, when they were restored by the British Film Institute.