The Aryan Couple

(120 mins, 12A)
Directed by John Daly; starring Kenny Doughty, Caroline Carver, Martin Landau, Judy Parfitt, Danny Webb, Steven Mackintosh

Based in part on fact, but not particularly credible, The Aryan Couple is about the fate of a rich Jewish Hungarian industrialist Joseph Krauzenberg (Martin Landau) who bargains with Himmler (an impressive Danny Webb) to save his wife (Judy Parfitt) and extended family from being sent to Auschwitz in 1944. In exchange for his factory, country mansion and vast art collection, he's to be kept out of German clutches and flown to safety in Switzerland. But what will happen to the family's valet and maid servant, the eponymous Aryan couple, who are in fact Jews working for the Resistance?

Well, this is a feel-good Holocaust movie, and in the spectrum of anti-Nazi films that runs from Resnais's Night and Fog and Munk's Passenger via Schindler's List to The Sound of Music, it is nearer, for all its manifest sincerity, to being a load of Trapp rather than a serious picture. This is the directorial debut of John Day, the producer who in 1967 formed the Hemdale Company with David Hemmings, and Hemming's lookalike son Nolan (named for the cavalry officer his father played in The Charge of the Light Brigade) has a small role as a German soldier.

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