AllMovie

Filmed in 1943, Gustav Molander's Det Brinner en Eid (There Burned a Flame) was released in the US two years later. The great Swedish director Victor Seastrom, who later starred in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, here heads the cast as an unnamed Theatre Manager. The story concerns a Scandavian Shakespearean troupe, doing its best to survive as an invading army marches into its homeland (no names are mentiond, but it's clear that the locale is Norway, and that the invaders are Nazis). A misguided foreign attache named Lemmering (Lars Hanson), who is in love with the troupe's leading lady (Inga Tidblad), schemes to keep the performers on stage so as to entertain-and hopefully appease--the occupying army. Instead, the actors join the Underground movement, determined to wipe the enemy off the face of the earth. Interestingly, the aristocratic Lemmering is depicted sympathetically, rather than as the brown-nosing Quisling he really is.