Blu-ray Film Review

Frieda (1947) • Blu-ray [StudioCanal, Vintage Classics]

A young woman from Nazi Germany struggles to be accepted in an English town.

Though not as well-known today as movies like Victim (1961) or The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), Frieda may count as one of Basil Dearden’s best-not only made with the consummate excellence typical of Ealing Studios’ heyday under Michael Balcon, but gaining an exceptionally sharp edge through its treatment of a then raw subject: the post-war relationship between Britons and Germans (and by extension, their countries).

Released only two years after World War II had ended, it spoke to fears, assumptions, prejudices and, of course, experiences that for many of its audience were still very much current, and in that it gains a sense of urgency and genuine dilemma that later treatments of the same issue (2019’s The Aftermath, for example) necessarily lack.