Shining Through is a 1992 World War II film drama, directed and written by David Seltzer and starring Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith. Although based on the novel of the same name by Susan Isaacs, the film's plot is considerably different. The original music score was composed by Michael Kamen. The film's tagline is: "He needed to trust her with his secret. She had to trust him with her life."
Plot summary
In 1940, before the United States has entered the war, Linda Voss (Melanie Griffith), a young woman of Irish/German Jewish parentage living in Queens, New York, begins a new job as a secretary with a New York law firm. Because of her German language skills, she becomes a bilingual assistant and translator to Ed Leland (Michael Douglas), a humourless attorney at law.
Linda increasingly suspects that Ed's activity is more than standard legal work. She is proved right when, after America officially joins forces with the Allies, he emerges as an officer in the OSS with the rank of colonel. She accompanies him to confidential meetings in New York and Washington, D.C., and before long, they also become lovers. But when he is suddenly posted away — probably on a mission to occupied Europe, she is left alone and devastated.
Assigned to work in the War Department, Linda sees or hears nothing of Ed until he reappears as suddenly as he left. Reluctant to resume their affair, he does re-employ her. Ed and his colleagues abruptly need to replace a murdered agent in Berlin at very short notice. Despite knowing little about intelligence work — only what she's seen in movies — Linda volunteers and Ed allows himself to be persuaded.
They travel together to Switzerland, where she is handed over to master spy Konrad Friedrichs, codenamed "Sunflower" (John Gielgud). Despite being appalled at her dialect ("the accent of a Berlin butcher's wife!"), he installs Linda in a cheap Berlin apartment and introduces her to Margrete von Eberstein (Joely Richardson), a beautiful and socially well-connected woman also working as an Allied agent.
Linda is planted as a cook into the household of a social-climbing Nazi, but her first dinner is a disaster and she is sacked on the spot. She is taken on as a nanny to the children of high-ranking Nazi officer Franz-Otto Dietrich (Liam Neeson), who had been a guest at the dinner. Unable to report back to Ed, she is taken to Dietrich's house and effectively drops out of sight.
Dietrich is in the habit of bringing home confidential documents, so Linda sets about searching the house so that she can find and photograph them. Contrary to orders, she also attempts to locate some Jewish cousins, believed to be hiding in a cellar in a Berlin suburb. She soon discovers that they have been arrested.
A bombing raid causes the Dietrich children to reveal a hidden room, where Linda photographs Dietrich's top-secret papers. Her cover is blown by Margrete's mother, who believes her to be a friend from university. In desperation, she seeks sanctuary with Margrete, only to find to her horror that she is a double agent who has betrayed Linda's cousins and has now also betrayed Linda. She shoots Linda, wounding her, but Linda is nevertheless able to overpower Margrete and kill her.
Badly wounded, she is found and rescued by Ed, who has come to Berlin in the guise of a high-ranking German officer. Pretending to be mute, as he does not speak the language, Ed takes Linda to the railway station and they travel to the Swiss border. Linda is barely alive and his travel papers are out of date. Ed's bluff fails to sway the border guards, forcing him to shoot his way out. Still carrying Linda, he struggles towards the frontier border. The German sniper guarding the border wounds him twice, but he manages to get himself and Linda onto Swiss soil before collapsing. The sniper is shot by his Swiss counterpart.
The film closes as it began, with a television interview of an elderly Linda. It is revealed that while Linda and Ed recovered from their injuries in a Swiss hospital, the microfilm of the secret German documents has been retrieved from a hiding place inside Linda's glove — a trick she learned from one of her favourite war movies.
Reaction
The film was neither a commercial nor a critical success. The infamous Razzie Awards in the U.S., in fact, declared Shining Through the worst picture of 1992, with Melanie Griffith being voted worst actress and David Seltzer worst director. There were also Razzie nominations for Michael Douglas as worst actor and for Seltzer in the category of worst screenplay.[1]
A review by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times thus began: "I know it's only a movie, and so perhaps I should be willing to suspend my disbelief, but Shining Through is such an insult to the intelligence that I wasn't able to do that. Here is a film in which scene after scene is so implausible that the movie kept pushing me outside and making me ask how the key scenes could possibly be taken seriously."[2]
Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that the first three-quarters of Susan Isaacs' book "never made it to the screen," including Linda Voss's love affair and marriage to her New York law firm boss, John Berringer. "David Seltzer's film version of Shining Through manages to lose also the humor of Susan Isaacs' savvy novel. Even stranger than that is the film's insistence on jettisoning the most enjoyable parts of the story."[3]
It was while working on this film that actress Melanie Griffith became aware, for the very first time in her life, that Germans had done bad things to Jews during World War II, and she was quite outraged about it. This earned her the nickname "Brainiac" which was used in Toronto-area print media for some time afterward.[citation needed]
Production
London scenes were filmed at Pinewood Studios, St Pancras railway station, and Hammersmith. Some of the extras that appeared in the scenes filmed in London, came from Kingston University's class of 1991. Some German scenes were filmed in the enormous central railway station in Leipzig prior to its massive modernisation by the Deutsche Bahn.
Notes
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