The Reel Review
Following Nazi Germany’s 1940 occupation of France, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorizes the creation of a women’s spy network to aid in the French resistance. Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic and Radhika Apte star in this historical war biopic about three of the actual women who served in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – Virginia Hall, Vera Atkins and Noor Inayat Khan.
The biopic, written by its star Thomas, doesn’t pull any punches in illustrating the initially amateurish methods and lack of support that these brave women endured behind enemy lines, as the SOE relied on the belief that women would be less conspicuous and better able to blend in. After rooming together during SOE training, Virginia and Noor’s stories diverge, as Virginia, sporting a prosthetic leg, establishes a resistance network in Lyon with Noor working as the spy agency’s first female wireless radio operator, based in Paris.
Some of the dialogue is more contemporary than period accurate and the pacing drags a bit in the second half of the film, but those are minor issues given the impressive attention to the story’s accuracy, solid production and strong performances of the actresses portraying these unheralded heroes. Fun fact: Monopoly games were actually used during WWII to smuggle escape kits, real money and maps, all cleverly disguised as part of the game, to imprisoned resistance members.
REEL FACTS
• After WWII, Virginia Hall, America’s most decorated female war hero, became one of the nation’s first female CIA agents until her forced retirement in 1966 at the age of 60. She and her husband, a fellow CIA agent, moved to a farm in Barnesville, Maryland where they lived until her death in 1982.
• Noor Inayat Khan, the SOE’s first female radio transmitter, tapped into her network of friends from her prior years living in France to create safe houses. She was captured and later executed at the Dachau Concentration Camp without revealing any information, not even her name.
• Vera Atkins, a Romanian Jew who immigrated to England to escape the Nazis and become the recruiter for the SOE, returned to France and Germany after the war to learn the fate of more than 50 unaccounted for spies. All but one had been killed.
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