Review of Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) by Kevin C — 26 Jun 2011

Wanting to do the right thing and bring a French soldier home for a dinner hosted by her French mother(Denise Grey), Violette(Virginia McKenna) meets Etienne(Alain Saury) in the park and invites him along. Romance soon blossoms between Violette and Etienne and in the sole moment when her friend Winnie(Billie Whitelaw) is not present to chaperone them, Etienne proposes marriage. They have a baby, Tania, while he is fighting in World War II. Sadly, he dies in the Battle of El Alamein. Six months later, Violette is summoned to the pensions department to see Potter(Sydney Tafler) who asks her if she would like a pension of her own as a liaison to the French resistance...

...and that's where "Carve Her Name with Pride"(based on a true story) should have started. The movie tries to infer that Violette is motivated to volunteer by Etienne's heroism but I feel she would have done so anyway because World War II was a time when ordinary people were called on to do extraordinary things for their country. Rather, I think the movie is structured this way to establish without a doubt the baby was not born out of wedlock(Quelle horreur!) and to set up the emotional payoff, allowing the movie to unfortunately slide into being a cliched soap opera at times. From what I can see here, Violette was extraordinary but the movie, left in a conflicted position of not knowing what to do with a female action hero, was made at a time not long after women were told to return to the safety of their homes to be just mothers.