This will be a very short review. As i write this, "Shining Through" only has 5.8 stars, and I am just flabberghasted. This is a very sad statement on the typical movie-goer, I guess.

I just watched this movie for the third or fourth time. It's clearly Melanie Griffiths finest performance, and just a perfect movie overall. It delivers the goods on many levels, is never boring, and always believable.

So, just to bump it up a hair, I give it TEN stars. (Realistically I'd give it an 8.5, but the rating badly needs to go up!)

When David Seltzer's "Shining Through" first came out it was a critical and commercial failure. I thought that it was at least worth seeing, if not any kind of masterpiece. I suspect that a lot of the antipathy towards the movie is because of Melanie Griffith's American-sounding German speech. Griffith plays a secretary in a law firm who gets sent into Nazi Germany to try and find secret information.

Aside from the German spoken in a monotone American accent, I found it a little odd that when she first arrives in Germany she does have to speak German to everyone, but then they start speaking English. But for the most part, I did like the movie. Aside from Griffith, Michael Douglas plays her boss whose whereabouts she doesn't know half the time, and Liam Neeson plays a Nazi officer. Joely Richardson and John Gielgud also star. Above all, Melanie Griffith looked a lot better before she had her face done.

Like I said, not any kind of masterpiece, but still worth seeing.

Melanie Griffith is am ambitious, quick-witted, German-speaking, young secretary at the Office of Strategic Services who is enlisted by her boss, Michael Douglas, and sent to Berlin to work for high-ranking Germans and uncover secrets concerning their V-2 rockets now being built at Penemunde. She winds up as a nanny in the employ of the sympatico Liam Neeson. She doesn't fall in love with Neeson, though the usual dramatic trajectory might seem to call for it, because her heart already belongs to Michael Douglas. He's too dumb to realize it. Berlin is full of agents and double agents. One of the latter plugs Griffith. She's rescued by Douglas and carried in his arms across the Swiss border with the details of the V-2 program concealed in her glove. Douglas and Griffith marry and live happily ever after.

None of the principals gives a bad performance but Neeson is perhaps the most interesting of the characters. His devotion to the party is suspected of being lukewarm and he's under suspicion by the Gestapo. Alas, he isn't on screen much and disappears completely as the climax approaches.

Most impressive is the evocation of the early years of the war. The make-up strikes us as garish. Berlin seems dark and ominous. The fashions and accouterments seem appropriate.

Griffith isn't bad. At least she's not embarrassing. Except for "Mulholland Falls," it may be her best performance. She's supposed to have learned German at her Jewish father's knee and have the accent of "a butcher's daughter," but she doesn't. She has an accent, but it's strictly an American accent. Speer's name comes out at "Shpear" instead of "Shpair." Diverting at first viewing, but not really worth seeking out.