Tower of Terror ** (1941, Wilfrid Lawson, Movita, Michael Rennie) – Classic Movie Review 13,892

The 1941 British wartime thriller film Tower of Terror stars Wilfrid Lawson, Movita, and Michael Rennie.

‘Three miles off the German Coast – WESTERRODE LIGHTHOUSE – lonely outpost of the North Sea’

Director Lawrence Huntington’s 1941 British wartime thriller film Tower of Terror is written by John Reinhardt, and stars Wilfrid Lawson, Movita, and Michael Rennie.

The Tower of Terror is a lip-smacking World War Two wartime melodrama, with an extremely daft and uninspiring plot about a British agent, Anthony Hale (Michael Rennie), using the cover of a lighthouse on Westerrode Island off the German Coast and its crazed German guard Wolfe Kristan (Wilfrid Lawson) to rescue a beautiful Frenchwoman concentration-camp fugitive, Marie Durand (Movita), from the clutches of the Nazis.

The film is odd and overwrought enough to overcome its essential daftness and be mildly entertaining in a creaky old British sort of way – and Lawson’s towering madman performance is worth putting up with a lot for.

It is amusing that nobody in the English cast speaks German or attempts German accents. In this respect, George Woodbridge is especially entertaining as Gruppenfuhrer Rudolf Jurgens

It was made at Welwyn Studios, with location shooting on Flat Holm off the Welsh coast.

Release date: 29 September 1941.

American actress Movita, (born Maria Luisa Castaneda, April 12, 1916 – February 12, 2015) was of Mexican descent and the second wife of actor Marlon Brando.

Cast: Wilfrid Lawson, Movita, Michael Rennie, Morland Graham, George Woodbridge, Edward Sinclair, Richard George, Charles Rolfe, John Longden, Victor Weske, Olive Sloane, Davina Craig, Noel Dainton, Rita Grant, Eric Clavering, Joe Welch, Charles Minor, Kieran Tunney, Robert Cameron, Sam Lee, Daley Cooper.

Westerrode Lighthouse is a fictional location. The real Westerode is an inland, not coastal, village in Bad Harzburg, Lower Saxony. Germany does have real lighthouses along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts, including Roter Sand, Pilsum, Borkumriff and Neuwerk, but none named Westerrode.

The story and screenplay are by John Reinhardt, with adaptation by the film’s producer John Argyle.

© Derek Winnert 2026 – Classic Movie Review 13,892

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