A truly inspirational real-life war hero(ine), Odette Sanson's story is so dramatic and fascinating that it's eventual translation to the cinema screen is as inevitable as night following day. Tastefully done yet still powerful – with strong performances from Anna Neagle, Trevor Howard, Marcus Goring and Peter Ustinov – the film is a good, solid bio-pic all-round.

During WWII, mother of three Odette Sanson (Anna Neagle) offers to work for British Intelligence. She is given a new identity and back-story, and dispatched to France where she comes under the command of top Allied spy Peter Churchill (Trevor Howard). Churchill has within his jurisdiction a small spy network working furtively and endlessly against the German war machine, among them the impetuous and courageous Alex Rabinovich (Peter Ustinov). Odette proves her own worth smuggling some vital documents out of Marseille, and is soon hailed as one of the most invaluable members of the team. Later she is captured and tortured by the Gestapo, but stubbornly refuses to yield any information, simultaneously surprising and infuriating her Nazi captors. After various trials and tribulations, she returns to England a bona fide war hero(ine) when the fighting ends in 1945.

After a stodgy and rather clumsily handled opening, Odette picks up pace, interest and drama as it gets going. Neagle handles the title role pretty well, conveying the stubborn pride and inner courage of the character most effectively; Howard too is solid (if a little underused) as her superior and eventual lover. The film is crisply shot, sometimes on the studio backlot but quite often on authentic continental locations, and generates an evocative sense of atmosphere in its dangerous world of wartime skulduggery and military intrigue. The torture sequences manage to be extremely distressing without showing everything in nauseating detail (a trick modern film-makers would do well to learn from), and a good level of tension is sustained pretty much throughout as Odette carries out her clandestine deceptions in this riskiest of times and places. All-in-all, Odette is a good film in the old-fashioned mould.

Painstaking reconstruction of lost heroes of the war in an almost documentary character, in this case the French resistance organized from England with a quite ordinary woman as the main link and foundation of the operations, as she as an ordinary woman is best fit not to attract attention. When she is asked to volunteer she has no experience whatsoever, an ordinary woman with three children separated from her husband, whom we never hear a word of throughout the film. Instead there is Trevor Howard as a certain Peter Churchill as the other main link in the operations together with Peter Ustinov as the indispensable radio operator. He is caught and killed by the Gestapo, which you learn already in the beginning of the film, but you never see it happen. Instead you see the full torture sessions and ordeals of Trevor Howard and Anna Neagle.

It certainly is one of her best performances, the direction by Herbert Wilcox is completely natural all the way, and Anthony Collins has provided the film with discreet but eloquent music perfectly suited to the action; but the perhaps most interesting performance is that of the dubious Marius Goring as the Abwehr man, who like Canaris is well aware of the fallacy of Hitler's regime and continuosly seeks a way out of the war dilemma but falls in with the tragedy and must take the consquences of being part of it.

It's a gripping film of the unknown heroes of the war that never reached any public acknowledgement, while they were the ones who risked their lives more than most and often lost it. Still, this is also a film of survival against all odds by sheer obstinacy and refusal to cooperate with a dictatorship.