THE FLEMISH FARM (1943)

In May of 1940, Belgium's air force is in tatters, their final holdouts operating from a farmhouse. With the Germans on their way to declare victory, the commanding officer (Clive Brook) is ordered to destroy as much equipment and burn as many records as he and his men can. They hold a midnight burial at sea for their regiment's flag, and the next morning as they prepare to fly their airworthy planes to England and join up with the RAF, pilot Philip Friend is taken to task by fellow officer Clifford Evans for not showing up at the ceremony, and instead canoodling with Jane Baxter, a local farm gal. But what Evans doesn't know is that Friend has secretly married Baxter, and that while the sea burial was going on with a decoy flag, Friend was burying the real flag somewhere on the farm in hopes that it could eventually be retrieved. Months later, Evans learns the truth about the flag from Friend, but Friend is killed in action the next day. Evans decides to take it upon himself to go back to Belgium and get the flag. Once in Ghent, he contacts Brook (now retired but secretly working with a resistance group), goes to the farm that was their headquarters, and finds the widowed Baxter and her child. She is reluctant to help, seeing the flag as not important enough for anyone to risk their life over, but as one character notes, "Strange the magic there is in symbols," and she soon helps him find it. But the return to England is dangerous; will the whole effort have been in vain?

This is an interesting and little-known propaganda film, a variation on the wartime spy film (there are no traditional combat scenes, though there is spy-style tension built up in the final third of the movie). Clive Brook is top-billed, but the real star of the film is Clifford Evans (pictured), and though he was mostly a B-movie lead, he acquits himself well here, as do Philip Friend (in his short time onscreen) and Jane Baxter. It's all very low-key which makes it feel a bit more realistic than the average wartime spy thriller. There’s a nice scene, also low-key, involving Evans having to meet secretly with his mother in a public park. I don't know how effective this would have been in its days as (literally) flag-waving propaganda; despite the stress on the importance of symbols, I'm not sure I felt that all the effort—involving the death of at least one person—was really worth it. But as a different take on the WWII film, it's worth seeing. [YouTube]