It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

The British wartime authorities' perennial obsession with fifth columnists ('enemy agents' were serving as baddies as early as the 1940 George Formby vehicle 'Let George Do It!') here finds elaborate expression in an ambitious production set in London during the Blitz. It took five credited writers to concoct this frequently hard to follow propaganda piece in which actual footage from the Blitz is adroitly combined with recreated studio footage. Censorship is benignly depicted as an essential part of the war effort (hence the title), while a pacifist organisation called 'People for Peace' is revealed to be not simply a Nazi front organisation run by British reactionaries but headed by authentic German 'sleepers' who privately converse among themselves in German. (With acts of terrorism in Europe by refugees from the Middle East now becoming almost everyday occurrences, the sequence depicting the arrival of a German agent masquerading as a Belgian refugee has disturbing contemporary resonances.)Richard Greene and Valerie Hobson are colourless leads, and dependable supporting actors like Basil Radford, Roland Culver and André Morell are generally given remarkably little to do; with the notable exception of Brefni O'Rorke as the editor of 'The Gazette', the newspaper the plot revolves around, who gets to deliver the film's stirring final speech at the fadeout.

"Unpublished Story" is a very unique look into Britain during the war years. In many ways, it comes off a bit like a documentary--with events unfolding shortly after they happened for real. However, it is a drama--one based, in part, on real events and real Nazi-backed movements within Allied nations.The film begins with a reporter, Bob Randall (Richard Greene) straggling in from the Dunkirk boat lift. He's dead tired but anxious to report what he saw--in particular, fifth columnists (i.e., Nazi agents posing as regular French citizens) who helped the Germans to topple France. However, to his surprise, he finds that folks in Britain STILL don't want to come to terms with this--and so-called 'peace' or 'appeasement' groups within the UK STILL are pushing for a peaceful settlement to the Nazis--even though the war was raging. But Bob is relentless and with the help of a new lady reporter (Valerie Hobson), they doggedly follow these groups and dig deeper. Not surprisingly, they find very bad people behind all of this.This is a very fascinating view of the war--through the eyes of the Brits and discussing a lot of things you rarely see through normal documentary films--the fear, the Home Guard, hysteria and the Blitz. To help matters, the acting is amazingly good--very realistic and subdued. It also helped that the film avoided many of the clichés and overly jingoistic material that sometimes filled Hollywood's wartime dramas. My only real complaint, and it's a tiny one, is the lousy use of rear projection in the scene outside St. Paul's during the Blitz.

Fast and sometimes exciting tale of a newspaper during the London blitz, amid Nazi conspiracies to undermine morale.Richard Greene is the correspondent who makes his way back to his Fleet Street newspaper from Dunkirk and Valerie Hobson is the novice lady reporter who is reassigned from the food column to stories of more substance.One of the subjects is the People for Peace, a small but busy group of men claiming that Hitler actually has the morality of a Buddhist monk or something. One of their henchmen is an almost unrecognizably young Andre Morell, putting on a curious accent. Their motto is "Peace in Our Time." Poor Neville Chamberlain. He could have prevented World War II simply by declaring war on Germany at the Munich meetings.The two intrepid reporters, dashing about the strepitous city, barely escaping the collapse of burning walls, expose the pernicious cabal and fall in love in front of a backdrop of the city in ruins except for the dome of St. Paul's.At the climax, the endearing Scotsman who edits the paper reads tomorrow's lead, which goes something like, "Goering has said he will bomb London flat because it is the heart. Very well. The heart will continue to beat." The reason the line is memorable is not so much for its defiant quality but because, a few years later, the Allies were demolishing one German city after another and the ruins were papered over with signs proclaiming, "Unsere Mauern brechen, unsere Herzen nicht," precisely the same sentiment and a similar analogy. And in fact the post-war Strategic Bombing Survey found that bombs were very good at tearing up cities but poor at breaking citizens' morale.But let's get back to Valerie Hobson. She's tall, slender, beautiful, and oozes elegance. She looks rather like Cate Blanchett except that she lacks Blanchett's extraordinary eyes. Richard Greene is adequate as the heroic reporter who helps save Hobson's bacon from the likes of that villainous, scowling Andre Morell.It's not a big budget movie but the production values are high enough so that we're not distracted by substandard sets. And there's hardly a dull moment -- or a brutal one. No scenes of battle and only a bit of gunfire towards the end. And a nice, familiar cast, with Basil Radford and Miles Malleson in support. Sometimes it seemed that the British film industry had only half a dozen principal performers during the war, and no more than double that number into the 50s.Other movies have been made about the blitz but they're either sentimental stories of worried families, like "Mrs. Miniver" or semi-autobiographical and more realistic accounts like John Boorman's "Hope and Glory." This one avoids sentimentality almost completely in favor of a sort of "training film" approach, only instead of "Assembly And Use Of The Sten Gun," it's "Optimal Responses to Bombing." That last scene, with the two lovers posed against a dim sun rising over a ruined urban landscape is touching and informative. It's a useful reminder of just how destructive war can be. America hasn't fought a war on its own ground for 150 years.A reminder might stimulate our thoughts a bit more, at least among those of us who seem so anxious to kill them all and let God sort them out. The only people who seem more warlike than those who have never known war are those who have never known anything else. I blame hormones. We have to get rid of all that testosterone. Imagine if all the men in the world were turned overnight into fairies. All they would do is try to insult each other to death.

British war correspondent Bob Randall (Greene) personally witnesses the Allied defeat in France in May of 1940. After a harrowing experience, he is fortunate to be evacuated to England. He immediately resumes his position as a reporterfor a major London newspaper.While reporting daily news events, he discovers a society of pacifists, thePeople for Peace. Bob is incensed by this group, believing their activities are defeatist and are only advancing the Nazi cause. Unknown to the public, this group has been infiltrated by German agents who manipulate the society to sow despair among the British people.As the Germans bomb British cities, Bob makes it his personal mission to report on the activities of this group. He finds opposition among reporters who want free speech and British censors who, for security reasons, don't want the story published. Bob is eventually joined by another reporter, Carol Bennett(Hobson), who helps expose the enemy in their midst.This well made wartime film includes elements of quiet and very effectivehumor. This offsets the grim nature of war against the civilian population of London. Recommended.