So Ends Our Night

So Ends Our Night is a 1941 drama starring Fredric March, Margaret Sullavan and Glenn Ford, and directed by John Cromwell. The screenplay was adapted by Talbot Jennings from the fourth novel Flotsam by the famous German exile, Erich Maria Remarque, who rose to international fame for his first novel, All Quiet On The Western Front.

The story begins in 1937 Austria, before the German occupation which would arrive the following year. Josef Steiner Fredric March is a middleaged German veteran who has been an ideological opponent to the Nazi regime from its inception and already escaped from two years in a concentration camp. Hes in hiding in a dodgy Austrian boarding house with young Ludwig Kern Glenn Ford in an early and outstanding performance, a bewildered 19yearold German from a prosperous family that was found to have Jewish forebears when the Nazis came to power and now halfAryan, are abruptly deprived of their German citizenship and passports, rendered stateless and ordered to leave the country.The two men are soon picked up and hounded by Austrian officials eager to deport them. Their friendship begins as they share a jail cell with two other hapless exiles Leonid Kinskey as The Chicken and Alexander Granach as The Pole and one professional gambler, proud of his full rights of citizenship Steiner studies the gamblers card tricks, and also befriends the miserable boy who desperately misses his family and nowvanished life of calm and certainty. Deported together, they part at the border, Ludwig to search for his parents in Prague, Steiner to double back and live by his wits in Austria. ........

Source: Wikipedia