Shining Through

For the Gretchen Espina album, see Shining Through (album). For the Miki Howard song, see Shining Through (song).

Shining Through
Directed by	David Seltzer
Produced by	David Seltzer Carol Baum Sandy Gallin Zvi Howard Rosenman
Screenplay by	David Seltzer
Based on	Shining Through by Susan Isaacs
Starring	Michael Douglas Melanie Griffith Liam Neeson Joely Richardson John Gielgud
Music by	Michael Kamen
Cinematography	Jan de Bont
Editing by	Craig McKay
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	January 31, 1992
Running time	133 mins.
Country	United Kingdom United States
Language	English German
Budget	$30 million
Box office	$43,838,238

Shining Through is a 1992 British-American World War II film drama, directed and written by David Seltzer and starring Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith, with Liam Neeson, Joely Richardson and John Gielgud in supporting roles. Although based on the novel of the same name by Susan Isaacs, the film's plot is considerably different. The original music score was composed by Michael Kamen. The film's tagline is: "He needed to trust her with his secret. She had to trust him with her life."

Plot summary

In 1940, Linda Voss (Melanie Griffith), a young woman of Irish/German Jewish parentage, begins a new job as a secretary with a New York law firm. Because she can speak German fluently, she becomes assistant/translator to Ed Leland (Michael Douglas), a humourless attorney. Linda gradually comes to suspect that Ed hides dark secrets. She is proved right when, after America officially joins forces with the Allies, he emerges as a colonel in the OSS. She accompanies him to confidential meetings in New York and Washington D.C., and before long, they become lovers. When he is suddenly posted away, she is left alone and devastated.

Assigned to work in the War Department, Linda hears nothing of Ed until he reappears as suddenly as he left. Reluctant to resume their affair, he does re-employ her. Ed and his colleagues abruptly need to replace a murdered agent in Berlin at very short notice. Despite knowing little about intelligence work — only what she's seen in movies — Linda volunteers and Ed allows himself to be persuaded by her fluent German and passion to contribute to the war effort. They travel to Switzerland, where Ed hands her over to master spy Konrad Friedrichs, codenamed "Sunflower" (John Gielgud). Despite being appalled at her dialect ("the accent of a Berlin butcher's wife!"), he installs Linda in the basement of his Berlin mansion and introduces her to his niece, Margrete von Eberstein (Joely Richardson), a beautiful socialite also working as an Allied agent.

Linda is planted as a cook in the household of a social-climbing Nazi, but her first dinner is a disaster and she is sacked on the spot. She is taken on as a nanny to the children of high-ranking Nazi officer Franz-Otto Dietrich (Liam Neeson), who had been a guest at the dinner. Unable to report back to Ed, she is taken to Dietrich's house and effectively drops out of sight. Dietrich brings home confidential documents, so Linda starts searching for them - intending to photograph them. Contrary to orders, she also attempts to locate her cousins, believed to be hiding in Berlin. She tracks down her relatives hiding place but is too late. They have already been captured and the cellar is empty.

A bombing raid causes the Dietrich children to reveal a hidden room, where Linda photographs Dietrich's top-secret papers. Her cover is blown by Margrete's mother, who believes her to be a friend from university. In desperation, she seeks sanctuary with Margrete, only to find to her horror that she is a double agent who has betrayed Linda's cousins and has now also betrayed Linda. She shoots Linda, wounding her, but Linda overpowers Margrete and kills her.

Badly wounded, Linda is found and rescued by Ed, who has come to Berlin in the guise of a high-ranking German officer. Pretending to be mute, as he does not speak the language, Ed takes Linda to the railway station and they travel to the Swiss border. Linda is barely alive and his travel papers are out of date. Ed's bluff fails to sway the border guards, forcing him to shoot his way out. Still carrying Linda, he struggles towards the frontier border. The German sniper guarding the border wounds him twice, but he manages to get himself and Linda onto Swiss soil before collapsing. The sniper is shot by his Swiss counterpart.

The film closes as it began, with a television interview of an elderly Linda. It is revealed that while Linda and Ed recovered from their injuries in a Swiss hospital, the microfilm of the secret German documents has been retrieved from a hiding place inside Linda's glove — a trick she learned from one of her favorite war movies. She waves to Ed, now her husband, and their two sons. Ed joins her on camera as the film ends.

Cast

• Michael Douglas as Ed Leland
• Melanie Griffith as Linda Voss
• Liam Neeson as Franz-Otto Dietrich
• Joely Richardson as Margrete von Eberstein
• John Gielgud as Sunflower
• Francis Guinan as Andrew Berringer
• Patrick Winczewski as Fishmonger
• Anthony Walters as Dietrich's Son
• Victoria Shalet as Dietrich's Daughter
• Sheila Allen as Olga Leiner, Magrete's Mother
• Stanley Beard as Linda's Father
• Sylvia Syms as Linda's Mother
• Ronald Nitschke as Horst Drescher
• Hansi Jochmann as Hedda Drescher
• Peter Flechtner as S.S. Officer at Fish Market
• Alexander Hauff as S.S. Officer at Fish Market
• Claus Plankers as S.S. Officer at Fish Market
• Renate Cyll as Woman in Fish Market
• Dana Gladstone as Street Agitator
• Lorrine Vozoff as Personnel Director
• Matheiu Carrière as Von Haefler
• Deirdre Harrison as USO Singer
• Wolf Kahler as Border Commandant
• Wolfe Morris as Male Translator
• William Hope as Kernohan
• Nigel Whitmey as 1st G.I. in Canteen
• Rob Freeman as 2nd G.I. in Canteen
• Lisa Orgolini as Girl in Canteen
• Jay Benedict as Wisecracker in War Room
• Thomas Kretschmann as Man at Zurich Station
• Klaus Münster as Cab Driver
• Markus Napier as S.S. Officer
• Constanze Engelbrecht as Stafson Von Neest
• Martin Hoppe as German Soldier
• Fritz Eggert as German Soldier
• Ludwig Haas as Hitler
• Clement von Frankenstein as BBC Interviewer
• Lorelei King as Leland's New Secretary
• Hans Martin Stier as Truck Driver
• Wolfgang Heger as Bus Conductor, Kinderstrasse
• Michael Gempart as Man at Kinderstrasse
• Hana Maria Pravda as Babysitter
• Lutz Weillich as Train Station Guard
• Wolfgang Müller as Bus Conductor
• Markus Kissling as Swiss Border Guard
• Anna Tzelniker as Cleaning Woman
• Andrzej Borkowski as German Refugee
• Simon De Deney as S.S. Man
• Tusse Silberg as Woman Dinner Guest at Drescher's
• Suzanne Roquette as Woman Dinner Guest at Drescher's
• Janis Martin as Opera Singer

Reception

The film was neither a commercial nor a critical success. The infamous Razzie Awards, in fact, declared Shining Through the Worst Picture of 1992, with Melanie Griffith being voted Worst Actress and David Seltzer for Worst Director. It also received nominations for Michael Douglas as Worst Actor and for Seltzer in the category of Worst Screenplay.

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "I know it's only a movie, and so perhaps I should be willing to suspend my disbelief, but Shining Through is such an insult to the intelligence that I wasn't able to do that. Here is a film in which scene after scene is so implausible that the movie kept pushing me outside and making me ask how the key scenes could possibly be taken seriously."

Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that the first three-quarters of Susan Isaacs' book "never made it to the screen," including Linda Voss's love affair and marriage to her New York law firm boss, John Berringer. "David Seltzer's film version of Shining Through manages to lose also the humor of Susan Isaacs' savvy novel. Even stranger than that is the film's insistence on jettisoning the most enjoyable parts of the story."

It was while working on this film that Melanie Griffith became aware, for the very first time in her life that Germans had done bad things to Jews during World War II, and she was quite outraged about it. This earned her the nickname "Brainiac" which was used in Toronto-area print media for some time afterward.

Production

The production had intended to shoot in Budapest, but just as locations were bring considered in the fall of 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, making it possible to shoot the film on location in East Germany. The majority of the film was shot in Berlin and Potsdam starting in October 1990, just as Germany was being reunified. Studio work was done at the DEFA Studios, the state film studios of East Germany.

Because all of Berlin's great train stations were destroyed in WWII, the production traveled some distance to Leipzig to shoot scenes in the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof terminus, built in 1915 and the largest in Europe. This was prior to its massive modernization by the Deutsche Bahn.

The finale of the film, set at a border crossing and involving a period train, was shot in Klagenfurt, Austria.

The New York and Washington scenes at the beginning of the film were shot in and around London and at nearby Pinewood Studios. Locations included the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Hammersmith, and St Pancras Station, which doubled for Zurich Station for a brief sequence set in Switzerland.

External links

• Shining Through at the Internet Movie Database
• Shining Through at the TCM Movie Database
• Shining Through at AllRovi
• Shining Through at Rotten Tomatoes
• Shining Through at Box Office Mojo

Awards
Preceded by Hudson Hawk	Razzie Award for Worst Picture 13th Golden Raspberry Awards	Succeeded by Indecent Proposal