Starring: Nan Gurley, John Schuck, Carrie Tillis
Distributor: Trafalgar
Runtime: 143 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2023
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A beautifully filmed stage-play adaption of the story of Corrie Ten Boom and her family who risked everything to hide Jewish refugees in their home in the Netherlands during World War II.
The first thing to say is that this is a worthy drama. It is the story of Corrie ten Boom, her sister, Betsie, father Casper, and extended family, who saved 800 Jews during World War II, hiding them in their house in Harlem, Holland. It would be seen as a complementary story to The Diary of Anne Frank. Corrie wrote the story of the hiding of the Jews as well as the internment of Betsie and herself in Ravensbruck concentration camp. There was a faith-based version of the story in the 1975 film of the same name, starring Julie Harris as Corrie.
The second thing to say is that this is a filmed version of a theatrical performance. On the one hand, it is valuable to have a version of a theatre event. On the other, the audience response to a filmed play is different from that for the cinematic treatment of a drama. It is stagebound and it is over to the inventiveness of the director and camera crew, and editors, to find the right angles, the close-ups, movement, for a cinematic response. The performances can be stagebound as well – theatrical, stylised.
Having said that, it is to the credit of Rabbit Room Theatre to have staged The Hiding Place, written by AS Peterson based on the book. And, to the theatre’s credit, it has filmed a performance in Nashville.
The theatrical effect is immediately evident as members of the cast come on stage, suitcases, searching, indication of what is to come. Throughout the play, the older Corrie speaks to the audience, is interrogated by a Nazi official, but with scenes of flashbacks, to her watchmaker father and his shop, to her sister, Betsie, and the love in the family.
However, the main action is the beginning of the invasion of Holland with Jewish refugees. The Dutch underground shelters Jews, finding food cards to sustain them, eventually coming to the ten Boom shop, where they are hidden, fed and housed before they able to be moved on – with, as has been noted, 800 Jews saved from being taken to the concentration camps.
The ten Booms were Dutch Calvinists, so lived by a strict interpretation of God’s will, of Christian love, and it being tested by extremes, the challenges of forgiveness. This is particularly the case when an arrogant young German comes to work in the shop, smugly superior, eventually joining the army, patrolling in Harlem, seen at Ravensbruck – and, at the end, the focus for Corrie and forgiveness.
Gurley is particularly forceful in the role of Corrie, not a simple saintly character, but generous, fearful, angry, challenged by Christian charity demands of forgiveness.
There is some tension in the hiding sequences, even more tension when the family is arrested, taken prisoner, then to the concentration camp.
When Corrie returns home, she wants a memorial to what has happened and begins travelling around the world in a mission of remembrance of the suffering and death in the Holocaust, and the consequences for the world.
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