False Colors

By R. S.

SOLDIER OF ORANGE

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Screenplay by Gerard Soeteman, Kees Holierhoek and Paul Verhoeven

Soldier of Orange is one of those Resistance dramas in which a small group -- in this case some Dutch university students -- becomes a cross section of a nation's responses to the Nazi Occupation during World War II. Some become heroes, some become collaborators, some simply get by. Their adventures, mostly the usual arrests by and escapes from the Gestapo, are recounted in a conventional glossy manner. Director Verhoeven obviously has studied the classics of the Occupation-adventure form, and he offers a competent pastiche of them.

The film's Dutch makers do occasionally bring to it a certain intensity, arising from still lively feelings about the wartime behavior of their fellow countrymen. Better yet, the movie is based on an autobiographical novel by Erik Hazelhoff, a Resistance hero now living in Hawaii. Hazelhoff escaped occupied Holland to join the Free Dutch forces operating out of England. He returned on an ill-fated mission to rescue some political leaders and later became an R.A.F. bomber pilot. As played by Rutger Hauer, he is an engagingly unmilitary figure, peering nearsightedly through rimless glasses at a once comfortable world going mad and finding unsuspected resources of moral courage within him.

Like Hazelhoff's story, the movie has about it the patchy, shapeless quality of reality. And that's the trouble. Soldier of Orange does not wear its slick, Hollywood style comfortably. All that gloss raises expectations of a more suspenseful narrative, stronger melodramatic payoffs. It is the sort of thing storytellers invent but reality rarely provides; the sort of thing that makes even silly efforts like Force 10 from Navarone or the recent Hanover Street seem mildly exciting. Something simpler, more documentary in manner would have suited Soldier of Orange better. As it stands, the movie is unsatisfying, both as action entertainment and as a serious study of people under the pressure of oppression. --R.S.

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