Plot
In London during World War II, Lieutenant David Halloran (Harrison Ford) an American bomber pilot serving with the Eighth Air Force in the UK and Margaret Sellinger (Lesley-Anne Down) a British nurse meet in Hanover Street in a chance encounter during an air raid
They meet again two weeks later in a secret assignation in Hanover Street. Although she is married, Sellinger and Halloran rapidly fall in love. She tries to resist, but is drawn to the charismatic American. By contrast her husband Paul Sellinger (Christopher Plummer) is, by his own description, suave, pleasant, but fairly dull. A former teacher, he is now a trusted member of British intelligence.
Halloran is subsequently sent on an undercover mission in Nazi-occupied France to deliver a British agent (Lieutenant Wells). At the last moment, Sellinger takes the place of the agent, and himself joins the mission. His reasons are initially unclear, but he slowly reveals that he wants to prove himself.
Flying over France, the aircraft is hit, killing the rest of the crew. The sole survivors, Halloran and Sellinger have to work together especially after the agent injures his ankle. Sellinger's mission is to arrive at the German headquarters in Lyon and, posing as an SS officer, photograph an important document that lists the German double-agents in British intelligence. Halloran agrees to help Sellinger. Making contact with the local French resistance, they disguise themselves as German SS officers and steal the documents. SS troops raise the alarm but the pair manage to escape after a lengthy car chase, and make it back to the same farm where they had received assistance. However, they are betrayed by a collaborator and are forced to flee again, pursued by hundreds of Nazi troops.
Halloran and Sellinger must work together in order to survive. In London, Sellinger's wife finds out that Halloran and Sellinger are together and have come back home, and her husband is wounded but alive. Going to visit him in the hospital in Hanover Street, she meets Lt. Halloran for the last time. The embrace and kiss, and he tells her that he loves her "enough to let her go", she goes in to see her husband, while he goes out into Hanover Street, where the love story had begun.
Read more about this topic: Hanover Street (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
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