(Some Spoilers) Very heavy handed WWII propaganda movie involving a young British tourist Jenny Whittridge, Ida Lupino, in Warsaw Poland looking to buy antiques for her picky boss British interior designer Mrs. Bowley, Mary Boland, who also happens to be a marshmallow addict. Jenny ends up falling in love with handsome Polish Count Stefan Orwid who's played by everyone's favorite refugee from fascism back in those WWII Hollywood days Paul Henreid.
Meeting Jenny in a Warsaw antique shop Stefan is fascinated with her knowledge of one of Poland's favorite sons musical composer Chopin and falls for her in Jennys ability to pay his piano concertos so expertly. As it turned Jenny's father was a piano teacher back in England who was also a Chopin enthusiast. In no time at all, in what seems like 48 ours, Stefan asks Jenny for her hand in marriage. Now living at the 10,000 acre Orwid Estate Jenny gets to work on her helpless, in him being forced to stay there, husband Stefan by taking control of the estate's summer harvest. Using tried and true principles of the Social/Capitalistic system Jenny uses a profit shearing scheme to get the local peasants who work there in order to increase their own output in the harvest.
This all has Stefan's Uncle Pavel, Victor Francen, the man who controls the money for the Orwid clan get very angry in that Jenny who's not even Polish and didn't go beyond high school in her educational pursuits is able to make him look ridicules in his inability to get those, the local peasants, at the estate to do their jobs like she did! What's really bugging Uncle Pavel is the peasants planing to form a union in order to get higher, instead of slave, wages for their labors. This would end the gravy train that Uncle Pavel and his good for nothing and high minded, in themselves, relatives have been riding on for the last 400 years!
All this is suddenly put on the back burner when Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 with his Panzers Stukas and mechanized divisions. Stefan who joined up with his unit, in which he ended up being its only survivor, in the Polish Calvary had his horse shot from under him as he tried to stop the German advance. Now with Poland not only fighting off the Germans but the USSR ,who joined the war as Germany's ally, as well it became obvious that Poland's days as a free and independent nation were numbered. With Poland now totally defeated and devastated all Jenny and Stefan could do is join the Polish resistance and continue the fight against fascism as guerrilla fighters. As the movie ends we see Jenny & Stefan set the Orwid Estate aflame to prevent the Germans from getting their hands on it and march off into the Polish forest to join up with the Polish partisans to the music of the Polish National Anthem "The Polonaise".
As for the fearless and take no BS, from Jenny & Stefan, Uncle Pavel he played it safe and checked out of the country with all the gold coins and silverware he could carry to peaceful and neutral Romania. As things, and history, was soon to turn out Uncle Pavel's freedom was short lived with peaceful and neutral Romania joining up with Germany and becoming her ally two years later in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union! The very nation that helped him carve up Poland two years earlier! That while Poland's "steadfast" allies France and England, who declared war on Germany for its invasion of Poland, stood by without as much as lifting a finger to stop it!
Meeting Jenny in a Warsaw antique shop Stefan is fascinated with her knowledge of one of Poland's favorite sons musical composer Chopin and falls for her in Jennys ability to pay his piano concertos so expertly. As it turned Jenny's father was a piano teacher back in England who was also a Chopin enthusiast. In no time at all, in what seems like 48 ours, Stefan asks Jenny for her hand in marriage. Now living at the 10,000 acre Orwid Estate Jenny gets to work on her helpless, in him being forced to stay there, husband Stefan by taking control of the estate's summer harvest. Using tried and true principles of the Social/Capitalistic system Jenny uses a profit shearing scheme to get the local peasants who work there in order to increase their own output in the harvest.
This all has Stefan's Uncle Pavel, Victor Francen, the man who controls the money for the Orwid clan get very angry in that Jenny who's not even Polish and didn't go beyond high school in her educational pursuits is able to make him look ridicules in his inability to get those, the local peasants, at the estate to do their jobs like she did! What's really bugging Uncle Pavel is the peasants planing to form a union in order to get higher, instead of slave, wages for their labors. This would end the gravy train that Uncle Pavel and his good for nothing and high minded, in themselves, relatives have been riding on for the last 400 years!
All this is suddenly put on the back burner when Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 with his Panzers Stukas and mechanized divisions. Stefan who joined up with his unit, in which he ended up being its only survivor, in the Polish Calvary had his horse shot from under him as he tried to stop the German advance. Now with Poland not only fighting off the Germans but the USSR ,who joined the war as Germany's ally, as well it became obvious that Poland's days as a free and independent nation were numbered. With Poland now totally defeated and devastated all Jenny and Stefan could do is join the Polish resistance and continue the fight against fascism as guerrilla fighters. As the movie ends we see Jenny & Stefan set the Orwid Estate aflame to prevent the Germans from getting their hands on it and march off into the Polish forest to join up with the Polish partisans to the music of the Polish National Anthem "The Polonaise".
As for the fearless and take no BS, from Jenny & Stefan, Uncle Pavel he played it safe and checked out of the country with all the gold coins and silverware he could carry to peaceful and neutral Romania. As things, and history, was soon to turn out Uncle Pavel's freedom was short lived with peaceful and neutral Romania joining up with Germany and becoming her ally two years later in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union! The very nation that helped him carve up Poland two years earlier! That while Poland's "steadfast" allies France and England, who declared war on Germany for its invasion of Poland, stood by without as much as lifting a finger to stop it!