True, it has some great Cole Porter tunes, including “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and “Well, Did You Evah?”, but the collective zing of Grant, Stewart and Hepburn is nowhere apparent. Grace Kelly is lovely but frigid, Bing Crosby is too avuncular to be romancing, and Sinatra goes through the motions with a distant professionalism. The Frank Sinatra Film Guide puts it best: “Casting Sinatra as the kind of sleaze journalist he so loathed in real life suggests someone had a sense of humour Unfortunately they didn’t get to write the script.”. Jan Hrebejk’s film about wartime loyalties and compromises is pitched as a comedy, but it’s the sort in which the laughs could almost be mistaken for gasps of dismay. Divided We Fall is comedy that gives you a jolt, and makes you wonder whether it might be more relaxing to watch tragedy instead.

Its looming backdrop is the Holocaust, something which begins as a rumour (“They say that it’s OK at Theresienstadt”) and then grips as a terrible everyday fact. If you’re thinking Life is Beautiful, think again: this has a compassion and wit that would put clown prince Benigni to shame. The youngest of them is David Wiener (Csongor Kassai), diffident son of a Jewish factory owner; the two older men are his chauffeur Horst (Jaroslav Dusek) and the company manager Josef Cizek (Boleslav Polivka). The story then leapfrogs a couple of times until it settles in the uncertain days of 1943. The small Czech town where they live is under Nazi occupation, and status has been inverted: the Wieners have been deported and their property carved up; one-time minion Horst, now a collaborator right down to his Hitler moustache, lords it at the table of his former boss Josef and his wife Marie (Anna Siskova). Horst’s idea of a joke is to bang on the couple’s door and yell, “Open up – Gestapo!”The story, written by Petr Jarchovsky, concerns a desperate act of heroism.

David, having escaped from the camps, throws himself on the mercy of Josef and Marie, who fret enough as it is over the suckling pig that’s hanging in the pantry – hoarding is a serious offence under the occupation. Now they must choose whether to harbour a Jew, knowing that discovery will mean death not just for them but the whole street. “This isn’t a roadside inn for fugitives”, Josef whispers to Marie (there’s a lot of whispering in this movie), a conversation which Hrebejk films from above, with the pig’s carcass lying porkily across the kitchen table Marie, a devout Catholic, insists on taking him in. Josef, a decent but querulous man, resents David’s intrusion not just because it’s dangerous – it’s also extremely inconvenient. Even if his conscience compels him to hide David in the kitchen bolt-hole, he’s not going to let him have his favourite blanket as well. Heroism, like the truth, is rarely pure, and never simple.Jarchovsky’s screenplay turns into a giddy, palm-sweating farce about public and private faces.