bkoganbing Knight Without Armour finds Robert Donat as a British agent, fluent in Russian, sent to spy on the revolutionary movement even before World War I started. Such things were done I'm sure as farsighted folks in the Foreign Office probably saw Europe headed for general war and Russia would have been the United Kingdom's ally in that case.Donat plays his part all too well, he's captured as a revolutionary and sent to Siberia and spends most of World War I there. Whatever else it does it certainly helps his cover. The original revolution that brought Kerensky to power frees the political prisoners and Donat now has to try and make his way home.In a parallel story aristocrat Marlene Dietrich gets the shock of her life when one day she wakes up and her servants have fled because the Russian Revolution has come to town. From hero{ine} to zero overnight, she's got to get out of a country that's now shooting her kind on general principles.They become allies of convenience and of course the shared experience of escape forges a romance as well. Both turn out to be pretty clever at taking advantages of breaks as they are captured a couple of times during the film.Robert Donat was one of the few of her leading men to not fall under Dietrich's amorous sway. But they became good friends and according to a recent biography of Marlene, Dietrich helped Donat with a special breathing technique she learned about to help control his asthma. Donat suffered from asthma all his life and it eventually killed him.The film is based on a lesser known work of British novelist James Hilton who also wrote Random Harvest and Lost Horrizon and of course Goodbye Mr. Chips for which Donat won his Academy Award for. It seems as though Hilton wrote his books with either Robert Donat or Ronald Colman in mind for the screen, they played his heroes so well.On screen Knight Without Armour suits the images and talents of Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich well and fans of both will appreciate it.

dbdumonteil That was Jacques Feyder's only English movie.He had just done his major works " Le Grand Jeu" "Pension mimosas" and "La Kermesse Heroique" and "Knight without armour" in spite of obvious qualities cannot compare with them.This is a tormented love story between a commissar (Donat) and a Russian countess of the old Russian aristocracy (Dietrich)who try to get to the border .The plot sometimes recalls a "Doctor Zhivago" in miniature.Best scenes ,in my opinion,are to be found in the first part: Dietrich,walking across her desirable mansion,all dressed in white ,finding that her staff has left home and joined the revolution;the same,facing a sinister-looking pack of Reds in her park.The mad station master,ceaselessly repeating that a train is coming into the station (madness was also present in Feyder's former works :"Le Grand jeu "was a good example of folie à deux )

chrisart7 One truly cares about the characters in "Knight Without Armour" (1937) (which at present is only available on Region 4 DVD---officially, that is). John Clements almost steals the film with a role that is little more than a cameo, but superbly acted. One can see how this part led to his being cast as the lead in "The Four Feathers" (1939), the very best motion picture produced by Alexander Korda and released by London Films, and one of the best movies of all time. Other character actors such as Miles Malleson also do memorable bits.This atypical role for Marlene Dietrich---a truly vulnerable, feminine character, though noble and glamorous---is superbly realised by the German actress, here playing a Russian countess. Robert Donat, excellent as always, is the lead, an Englishman travelling incognito in Russia before, during, and after the Revolution.There is one scene early in the film which is an interesting reversal of a portion of "Battleship Potemkin"'s Odessa Steps sequence: in "Potemkin" the "White" Cossacks, a faceless, cruelly efficient horde simultaneously gun down a "Red" woman who tries to appeal to them for mercy for her dying child. In "Knight Without Armour" a horde of Reds trudge en masse across the palatial estate of "White" Countess Alexandra, played by Marlene Dietrich. The scene in which she encounters the unsympathetic, destructive mob on her great lawn, and the momentary lull before they act, is unmistakably a comment upon "Potemkin" and its pro-Red propaganda. American audiences may find the various, regional British accents of the Russian characters a bit jarring. Filmed during the height of the Depression, this is a great lovers-on-the-run film with a world-falling-apart backdrop, irresistible entertainment in any era. Find this one! Used VHS copies are easily had. Miklos Rozsa's score, one of his first for film, has the same warmth and pathos that embodies most of his splendid catalog of work.

theowinthrop Most people never have heard of Bruce Lockhart. He was (with Sidney Reilly) one of the two best British Agents in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Reilly (whose life was the basis of a BBC series about twenty years ago called REILLY: ACE OF SPIES) died in Russia - either having been executed or (more likely) willing to become an agent of the Soviet Secret Police. Lockhart stayed in Russia until the early 1920s, when (in a remarkable series of close calls) he escaped through Central Asia into India and returned home. His memoirs were eventually published.Lockhart's career is the basis of James Hilton's character A. J. Fothergill / Peter Ouragoff (Robert Donat) in the novel KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR. Not totally, of course. Lockhart did not end his life with an ex-Russian countess as his wife (Marlene Dietrich here, as Countess Alexandra Vladinoff). But the general tone of Lockhart's career in Russia is there. Also the support Lockhart (and most western governments) tended to give the White Russians who were anti-Bolshevik.The story is Hilton's Russian Revolution novel. As such it tends to the anti - Bolshevik line that the West took, with Dietrich one of the persecuted ex-aristocrats who are in danger of being shot by the new rulers of Russia. To the credit of the screenplay some of the White Russian brutality is shown, but the edge of the story looks at the Bolsheviks as evil incarnate, except for John Clements who finds that rescuing Dietrich at one point is just too much for his own twisted standards. The film is a good one, but somehow the action is too jumpy - in particular the initial stages of the story which goes from 1910 to 1917 to quickly. We know that Dietrich is widowed by the war, but we never learn what happened to her husband (presumably killed in battle). Some of the later events are speed-ed up, and the conclusion we assume is happy, as Donat jumps out of the temporary restraints on his own person, and apparently jumps successfully onto Dietrich's train to be reunited with her.But the best moment of the film is shared with another actor - Hay Petrie as a station master. It was the scene that stood out above all others to Graham Greene, at that time a movie critic for a London newspaper. Greene enjoyed this weird scene where Donat and Dietrich are fleeing and find railway tracks and a little, undisturbed station. They enter and go to the ticket office, but can't find anyone. Then Petrie turns up and says that they'll have to purchase their tickets on the next train. He tells them it will be there in fifteen minutes. They sit down and hope the train will take them away from their Bolshevik pursuers. They converse about their situation and plans. Then Petrie returns and tells them to get ready - the train is coming. They go out on the platform and don't see any sign of any train in either direction. Petrie comes out waiving a broken lantern and announcing the arrival of the next train, and the horrified couple realize they've been dealing with a madman. Greene was right: it was the moment of the film that remains most firmly in one's memory.