The Aryan Couple

It’s a sad duty to have to apply the critical sledgehammer to this would-be heartening Holocaust dramatic thriller, the second feature as writer-director by John Daly, the maverick 70-year-old London-born producer and co-founder (with David Hemmings) of Hemdale. Shot in palatial locations in Poland (quite ably by Sergei Kozlov) and set in Hungary in 1944, it outlines the fate of a pair of young married Jewish resisters (Caroline Carver and Kenny Doughty), posing as Germans in the service of unsuspecting Jewish steel magnate (Martin Landau) as he negotiates personally with Himmler and Eichmann to safeguard his family from the Auschwitz transport in return for his commercial and personal empire.

Notwithstanding the unacceptably saccharin score and the poverty of the script, with its bow-your-head-in shame dialogue and potentially offensive levels of historical revisionism, the film has the dramatic inertia of an Agatha Christie Xmas TV special, its ham-fisted direction all too often reducing the preponderantly British cast (Danny Webb, Steven Mackintosh) to near-risible caricature.