Hello God (1951) User Reviews

A Story Unto Itself

[bkoganbing · 13 January 2011]

I do so wish that the 7 people who voted on this film enough to give it a rating would have written something on it. Presumably they saw the film enough to give an opinion.

Which is why I will not put a star rating on it. Reading in the Citadel Film series book, The Films Of Errol Flynn, the story behind the film and the reason it hasn't been seen in the USA sounds like the great basis for a film itself.

Long story short, Flynn and partner/producer and sometime character actor William Marshall did this small film in Europe about some soldiers killed at Anzio Beach on their way to heaven. After completion Flynn and Marshall quarreled. Flynn got the original negative destroyed, but Marshall then recreated it with outtakes. It got some showing in Europe, but has never been shown here, at least not at the time that Citadel Film series book was written.

Given the times, the film also put Flynn in the crosshairs of some professional anti-Communists with its pacifist message. He repudiated it completely. His contract with Warner Brothers also was called into play here.

Maybe one day we'll see Hello God in the USA in a formal setting. One thing for sure, no question it will be the director's cut.

Lost Film

[dennisrein · 10 February 2023]

For many years this was considered a lost film, but in 2013 a copy was discovered in the basement of the surrogate court of New York City. Two of seven cans of the movie were deteriorated beyond hope, but five survived and are at the George Eastman House film archive for restoration.

Plot An unknown soldier (Errol Flynn) relates the story of four young men who are killed at the Battle of Anzio before they go into Heaven. As they approach Heaven, the soldiers ask to be accepted, although they arrived long before they were permitted to complete their lives on Earth.

Flynn made the film in partnership with William Marshall, an actor turned producer. The movie was originally entitled Before You Sleep Tonight and Flynn agreed to own a half interest in the film in exchange for a promissory note worth $25,000 signed in July 1949. Flynn made the movie in Italy in late 1949 on the way back from India, where he had been filming Kim. He worked on it for ten days and Flynn says his fee was $2,700 a day.