Two Thousand Women (1944) User Reviews

Stylish, sexy wartime comedy-drama.

[Neil-117 · 6/10 · 23 August 2001]

All those women are confined in a remarkably luxurious German internment camp without male company. What a waste, as so many of them seem to have film star looks and wardrobes to match. So what better spot for some British airforce chaps to seek refuge? Seriously now folks, those British boys must be helped to escape at once. But it's awfully hot in here don't you think, perhaps I'll just take a bath...

After a slow and rather class-conscious opening, the story develops into a stylish, sometimes funny and often sexy battle of wits against the usual hapless German guards and the occasional informer. Along the way, the camera lingers wistfully on every stockinged thigh and lacy bosom, but somehow everyone manages to keep thinking of England – at least some of the time.

A top cast of female leads.

Light-Hearted Thriller About British Internees.

[rmax304823 · 6/10 · 24 September 2012]

Patricia Roc is on leave from a French convent. She's wearing her nun's habit when the French authorities pick her up and accuse her of being a German spy. She LOOKS like a nun. She has a clean, honest, pretty face that's not overly expressive. I guess I should say she looks the way a nun SHOULD look. My nuns didn't resemble her at all. Mine impressed me as huge bat-like creatures waiting to swoop down on you with a ruler.

Anyway, she's a novice, not yet having taken her vows. What this almost always means is that there's a man in her future -- and so there is.

The Germans occupy the town and Roc is given crummy clothes and transferred to a guarded compound that used to be a luxury hotel, somewhere near Rouen. There are a thousand or more other British women held prisoner there. They are the usual varied group. There is Flora Robson with her long face and squinched eyes exuding authority. There is the cynical babe crepitating with wisecracks. There is the stripper (ie., whore) who is selling her body to the German sergeant in return for a single room instead of a double. There are one or two hefty Nazi moles in the group too.

Their life in the internment camp didn't strike me as particularly demanding. Nobody complains about the food. It's an attractive resort hotel, after all, with spacious grounds including a summer house. Their most ardent complaint is that they have to schlepp hot water up four flights of stairs to take a bath and then two at a time must share the tub before the water cools. Except for the barbed-wired inner and outer walls, conditions are better than those under which I grew up.

But the capacious rooms and the absence of genuine hardships is necessary to maintain the tone of the story, which is Gemutlich and even gay. The girls stage shows in the ballroom, with costumes and a band, to entertain one another as well as the German staff.

Then -- cherchez l'homme. A British bomber is disabled over the compound and three men parachute inside its walls. They must be hidden from the soldiers and the spies. And then, after a romantic interlude between Patricia Roc -- whose character has the same name as an attractive girl I once took to Roseland in New York -- the three airmen must be helped to escape. As the aviators speed away in their stolen staff car, the ladies all gather on the stage and sing, "There'll Always Be An England." The story isn't uninteresting and there are a couple of witty lines in the dialog. At the beginning, Roc is hustled onto a German truck filled with other captured internees. The woman next to Roc introduces herself and begins gabbing away. A third girl is sitting there and, not having been introduced, asks, "Don't I exist?" The other snaps, "Yes, unfortunately." For all the dashing around, giggling, and chat, it's never slow or boring and there are some moments of genuine drama. A diverting war-time piece.

British women in an internment hotel in France

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 12 March 2021]

"Two Thousand Women" from 1944 is about a group of British women imprisoned at a glamorous French hotel. The place doesn't have a lot of amenities, but they're together with a place to sleep and food.

Some RAF men parachute into the area and sneak into the hotel. It falls to the women to hide them and then to help them escape.

The marvelous cast of women includes Flora Robson, Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Renee Houston, and Jean Kent. Kent plays a floozie trying to seduce one of the German soldiers.

Good film, and different. The last scene is very stirring!

British Cinema at it's best

[garlygogs · 30 October 2011]

I recently stumbled upon this film on Channel 4. Thankfully I only missed the first ten minutes as it turned out to be a most enjoyable film.

If you're reading this review then you have most probably seen the movie so a synopsis is not needed.

All I really have to say is that the mainly female cast is absolutely superb. I defy anyone to pick out a single performance that stands out from the rest. Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Thora Hird..the excellent cast just oozes British actresses who went on to even greater performances.

The only thing that let's this film down are the actors who play the British soldiers. Whilst they are good, I found them maybe a little too old for the parts.

All in all though, it is a splendid film. If a remake were made today, it could boast an amazing cast of todays British talent.

I checked IMDb after watching this film and sadly, most of the cast are with us no more. It is as a tribute to them that I write this little review.

Despite a few odd plot elements, a very good British propaganda film.

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 8 April 2010]

While I could see a few plot problems here and there, this British propaganda film did a good job of rallying the folks at home for the war effort. It begins in France just after the fall of the country (summer 1942). While you rarely hear about them, naturally some British citizens got stranded in the country and could not make it back to the UK. This film concerns British women who were interred by the Germans in a rather nice and luxurious hotel. While I have no idea how the Germans actually treated such women, I doubt if they were as nice and lax as they were in the film. This is a rare case where the Nazis portrayed in the propaganda film seemed nicer than the real thing--usually it's the other way around!

The film initially is about these women adjusting to their new home and it took a strange turn when three British airmen were shot down and actually sought refuge with the women! The idea of them being able to just sneak in to this guarded facility seemed hard to believe. However, because the acting was very good as well as the direction and script, it seemed to work well. Despite a good job, there were a few sour notes. One was that when the prisoners or escaped fliers fought with Nazis, the bad guys had a very convenient habit of NOT crying out for help when they were attacked!! The other was late in the film when one woman went from loving one of the fliers to turning him in to the Nazis with incredible speed--it made no sense and seemed quite contrived. Still, the film generally underplayed the drama and was otherwise pretty convincing.

For a somewhat similar plot but better handled is Claudette Colbert's "Three Came Home"--which is based on a real American woman's experience in a Japanese internment camp.

Women in War at Home were Domestic Soldiers.

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 6 February 2013]

Even when under Nazi guard in a detention center, these women gather together to fight, scheme, laugh, love and entertain-all for the purpose of getting three British soldiers who crash-landed near their temporary home to safety. This enjoyable drama of a different type of resistance features a diverse variety of characters-flirtatious, bitchy, noble, older and wiser, dizzy, and even betrayers like the oh-so-plucky butch floor leader who is actually a Nazi informer. Lead by legendary British actresses Phyllis Calvert and Flora Robson, this patriotic flag-waver is a salute to the women left alone while their men fought or were already victims of the Nazi evil. Robson as a no-nonsense spinster unafraid to stand up to the Nazis gives a memorable performance especially when facing the threat of being shipped to Germany for alerting the British Air Force to the compound during an air raid. There are many moments of great satisfaction that these women have in either fooling or harassing the Nazis, particularly one when they have a house meeting with one of the men in attendance in drag.

The horrors of wartime occupation

[sol1218 · 6/10 · 17 September 2008]

***SPOILERS*** The movie "2,000 Women" has to do with ex British showgirl and Paris night club singer Rosemary Brown who ends up becoming a nun after she broke up her cheating, on his wife, boyfriend's marriage. Now arrested by the French police as the German Army advances into France in the late spring of 1940 Rosemary is thrown into prison as a suspected German spy! It's later in the movie when Rosemary, after being freed from a French prison cell by the Germans, is sent to the German womens internment camp in Marneville France that things start to turn around for Rosemary as her, and her fellow 2,000 women internee's, live the kind of life that one can only dream about.

Having all the convenience of living under stressful wartime conditions Rosemary and her fellow British women prisoners need only one thing to keep them from going crazy from boredom and that's a handsome and willing young man! And a British one at that! Not that the Nordic and Aryan looking German soldiers at the Marneville detention camp are not attractive! For the patriotic English girls to have any kind of relationships with their German captors, as the British lads are on the front lines getting shot at, was considered by them to be an act of treason against the British Crown!

It's no too long when, like manna from heaven, three RAF bomber pilots and gunners parachute into Marneville to the delight of the man hungry women living there. Despite wanting to be with a man, a British man, more then anything else in the world the love starves British woman do everything possible to get the boys, who'd rather be there at Marneville then anywhere else, out safe and back to England even at the cost of their, and the fly-boys, lives!

More of a comedy then a war propaganda movie "2,000 Women" has the hapless German soldiers at the womens detention camp get screwed at every turn in the film. These fearless and indestructible Nazi Supermen are so incompetent in keeping the women, looking like they just stepped out of Cosmopolitan Magazine, in line that you wonder how they at one time, in late 1942, were very seriously on the brink of winning WWII!

Things almost backfire on the women's plan to get the fliers out safely to England when woman detainee, and Rita Hayworth look-alike, Birdie Johnson is caught by her fugitive, from the German Gestapo, RAF Canadian boyfriend Davy Kennedy alone in her room with German Army Sergeant Hentzner. Not knowing that Birdie was only using the love sick Sgt. Hentzner to get her tea bags and nothing else Davy blew a fuse and ended up strangling him to death!

As you would expect in movies like these, made to lift wartime moral, Sgt. Hentzner in fighting for his very life not only failed to use his gun to defend himself from the disarmed Davy, who gave him every chance to discharge it, but also failed to open his mouth and scream for help with hundreds of fellow German soldiers within yards of coming to his rescue!

**SPOILER ALERT** In the end the boys, the RAF men, are snuck out of Maneville by car as the girls, or women, distract the entire German Army stationed there with a song and dance as well as strip tease act. This has the Germans more interested in what's going on the stage then what going on, with the RAF men escaping, right under their noses!

I kept wondering as the film so abruptly ended where exactly were the three RAF men going with the Germans controlling all the roads and highways leading to the English Channel which is their only avenue of escape? Wouldn't it have been far better for them just to stay at Marneville, with the 2,000 gorgeous and man hungry women, for the remainder of the war! With the Germans there so incompetent in doing their jobs there's no way they would have noticed them being there in the first place!

WWII internment camp for women comedy-drama

[davey-7 · 10/10 · 30 August 1998]

The critics were a bit sniffy at the time of its release, but this is one of the jolliest films made during the war. It concerns a group of English women caught in France during World War II and interned in a posh hotel.

It's full of the sort of "There'll always be an England" stiff upper lip stuff that looks so kitch these days, and yet there's also a feeling of release for these women since there are no men around.

Sadly, some RAF men accidentally parachute into the camp and the women have to hide them from the Germans. The men are undercast and a bit dreary, but they wouldn't stand a chance against the cream of British character actresses anyway.

The rest of the film concerns the women's attempts to smuggle the men out of the camp. The plot however is irrelevent. What matters is the way these actresses work without having to compete for billing with any male star.

The film is fun, risque and the best British romp before Tom Jones.

Smoothing It

[writers_reign · 5/10 · 30 May 2009]

Anyone waiting in vain for a number 63 bus in November, 1944, who happened to see this film soon afterwards would have realised that the missing omnibus was being driven through this plot that makes gossamer look like industrial strength tungsten. It's almost impossible to imagine that anyone who saw it in late 1944 or early 1945 and had endured five years of austerity would not have been insulted by this portrait of women actually living in interement but enjoying better lifestyles than those enjoying freedom at home. There's a token scene at the beginning where established internees haul buckets of water upstairs to fill a bath for a batch of newcomers but otherwise the women are expertly dressed and coiffed and as icing on the cake Phyliss Calvert turns up to a concert - within the château and one that has not been rehearsed and/or even mentioned until it is in full swing - in an evening dress magicked from God knows where. On the credit side it is a chance to see a turnout of half the distaff side of the British film industry at the time via the likes of Flora Robson, Thora Hird (even carrying her own daughter, Janette Scott, then a babe in arms) Ann Crawford, Jean Kent, Renee Asherson and an uncredited Dulcie Gray. Nice cast, shame about the joke of a plot.

Great fun!

[tfkilkenny · 10/10 · 8 May 2020]

There are some excellent reviews above so I'll not waste any time explaining what happens. Suffice to say, I'd never heard of this film before and just happened to catch it on Film4 on VE Day 2020, and found it an enjoyable and undemanding way to spend an hour or so. Take it for what it is and it's an easy 10/10.

Daft

[kris-gray · 5/10 · 9 January 2019]

The listing says comedy/drama, well it could possibly stand alongside such wartime comedies as 'The Goose Steps out' or 'Very Important Person' but not quite. Why it is called 2,000 Women is beyond me when we barely see two dozen, I mean how many rooms would you need to 2 at a time in, 1,000, really do the maths.

Tenko this ain't!

The women prisoners look well fed, wearing the best clothes and heavily made up, I can't imagine the Germans treated any British female prisoners like this. OK it was made during the war and there is perhaps a bit of propaganda about it, but to say it's a comedy is laughable in itself.

I can't believe the like of Dame Flora, Phyllis Calvert and Jean Kent agreed to do this daft piece of tosh. There is one scene when one of the men are seen smoking a pipe, as if.

I'm saying avoid it but don't expect anything close to factual.

Annoying women

[AAdaSC · 5/10 · 23 March 2010]

The setting is a women's internment camp which resembles a very large, posh country house with several halls, plenty of space and some luxury rooms. Three RAF pilots find their way into the camp and the women must hide them before these 3 heroic chaps can make their escape. Will things work out as planned....?

There are definitely not 2,000 women in this place. There are, however, a group of irritating women who deserve to be incarcerated. Phyllis Calvert as "Freda" speaks in a ghastly posh accent for the whole film and is quite annoying. Jean Kent as "Bridie" is the funniest to watch while Renee Houston as "Maude" is far better as a cabaret singer/performer than as a wise-cracking street-girl. Betty Jardine does well as section supervisor "Teresa" but there are no great performances in this story. Patricia Roc as "Rosemary" comes off as the best character but she shouldn't be in the film in the first place. She is caught by the French signalling to German airplanes to blow up an ammunition hold. She's in the wrong goddam prison!

An attempt is made at sentimentalism by having somebody sing "There's no place like home" whilst we pan across several of the women's faces. It's rubbish. Another moment that doesn't work happens when Muriel (Flora Robson) and Clairen (Muriel Aked) are taken away to a German prison camp. I'm afraid that we just don't care! There is no drama. The men have absolutely no presence and come across as slightly wimpish.

The ending is laughably bad. I'm not referring to the plot but to the rendition of "There'll always be an England". However, the film is lightweight fluff that passes the time and it's OK as that.