The Red Meadows is a 1945 film from Denmark directed by Bodil Ipsen and Lau Lauritzen Jr.
It was one of the first films produced in Denmark after liberation, and it's about La Résistance. The date is not specified but a remark about Stalingrad and a German soldier saying he's been away from home for "four years" implies 1944-45. Michael Lans is a saboteur and member of the Danish Resistance, who, as the film opens, is being held in a German prison. This opening scene is followed by a lengthy flashback in which Michael is shown with his Resistance cell, and also with his faithful girlfriend Ruth. Michael's cell receives, via British parachute drop, some explosives, which they plan to use to destroy a factory producing German aircraft parts. Unfortunately, a member of their group is snitching to the Nazis.
Tropes:
- Dressing as the Enemy: Michael is walking down a country road after narrowly having escaped arrest, when a German sergeant in a car stops to offer him a lift. Michael returns the favor by pulling a gun on the sergeant and then putting on the sergeant's uniform before driving away. This gets him past a checkpoint at a ferry.
- Driven to Suicide: Steinz receives word that his wife and children are dead, presumably killed in an Allied bombing raid. After finding this out, he helps Michael to escape, and then he kills himself.
- Fingore: The Germans torture Michael by putting his fingers in a vise and crushing them. By the time they're done Michael's fingers look like raw sausages, but he doesn't talk.
- For Doom the Bell Tolls: After escaping from the German car with Steinz's help, Michael runs into a bakery. As he goes to a phone the clock on the wall chimes 6 a.m. Michael cringes, and imagines Dreyer being executed at that exact moment.
- How We Got Here: After a relatively brief opening scene showing Michel in a Nazi prison, an extensive flashback shows him with his Resistance cell, and meeting Ruth in a Resistance safehouse, before the attack on the factory that gets him arrested. The flashback takes up nearly half the film.
- Imagine Spot: A couple. Michael imagines Prikken informing to the SS; he's right. Near the end Michael imagines Dreyer being shot by firing squad.
- Inner Monologue: Michael's inner monologue as he's being sentenced to death by Nazi court martial has him thinking that he doesn't mind dying, but that he'd like to see Ruth again.
- Killed Offscreen: The Resistance men take Prikken out of a car and frog-march him into the woods. Shots ring out, then the men return from the woods, without Prikken.
- The Mole: The men of Michael's cell think that someone may be informing on them, after Moller, one of their own, is arrested. This impression deepens after Dreyer is also arrested and then the Germans show up when Michael and the men are raiding the factory. It turns out that Prikken is the one who is informing on them to the Germans.
- Narrator: Used only briefly in the opening shot, of a prison. A narrator muses that one day the histories will be written and people will learn about the heroes the Germans locked up in cells.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: Ends with Michael, on a fishing boat, being taken across the straits to Sweden and safety with Ruth.
- Plunger Detonator: Played with, and also an example of Shown Their Work. The detonator for blowing up the factory looks like a Plunger Detonator, but the handle is actually turned instead of pushed down, like with real German detonators of the era.
- La Résistance: The Danish resistance, which is in the habit of blowing up German warehouses and factories.
- Shot at Dawn: Discussed Trope. As Dreyer and Michael sit around in the Nazi prison after their sentencing, Dreyer says that they have 20 hours to live, as it's 10 am and the Germans always execute people at 6 in the morning. Sure enough, they're both taken away early the next morning, but Steinz helps Michael to escape.
- Title Drop: As Michael and Ruth hide out in the safe house, she looks out the window and says that she can look at the trees and the green meadows, because he's there with her. But if he gets himself killed, she won't be able to see any of that anymore, because to her, the meadows will be stained red with Michael's blood.
- Token Good Teammate: Steinz, the German soldier who is Michael's guard in the Nazi prison. He's a gentle, mild-mannered guy, who wants nothing more than to go home to his wife and family. At Michael's request Steinz carries a letter to Michael's Resistance comrades, and later, he helps Michael escape.
- We Have Ways of Making You Talk: Said word-for-word (well, word-for-word in German and in the subtitles) by Major Mackensen, the SS man who then proceeds to brutally torture Michael.
- You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Prikken says this when his comrades identify him as The Mole and pull guns on him. He's wrong.
