Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ on Hulu, Where A Woman Is Caught Between Bad And Worse People On The Hunt For Nazi Gold

Directed by Jesse V. Johnson, who’s known best for a string of pretty solid Scott Adkins-starring VOD actioners – 2017’s Savage Dog was a standout – Hell Hath No Fury (Hulu) brings a heftier amount of character development and story to its tidy tale of a Frenchwoman caught between American soldiers, a dastardly SS colonel, and French resistence fighters all vying for a stash of stolen Nazi gold. 

HELL HATH NO FURY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: France, 1944. Four American soldiers are operating way outside the lines, rumbling in their Jeep toward a secluded cemetery in Aubagne. The Major (Louis Mandylor), his right hand man and noncom Jerry (Timothy V. Murphy), and infantrymen Chris (Luke LaFontaine) and Vic (Josef Cannon) have in tow Marie (Nina Bergman), whose roughly shorn hair marks her as a Nazi sympathizer. The Americans saved her from a mob of townspeople prepared to mete out even more punishment, but that rescue came with a price: tell them where a clutch of Nazi gold is hidden inside the cemetery. Marie has traded one bad situation for another full of considerable peril. But she figures it’s just another day in the life.

Marie did sympathize with the Nazis. She sought out a ruthless SS colonel named Von Bruckner (Daniel Bernhardt), and became his lover. But it’s not that simple. Her reasons for seeking out Von Brucker are very personal, and his theft of Nazi gold bars gave her even more cause to sell him out to the Maquis. But the ambush of the colonel she arranged with the French resistance went south, she was forced to improvise, and she ended up spending three years in Ravensbruck, the Nazis’ infamous women-only concentration camp. The insults these Americans throw her way aren’t gonna do any damage.

Marie stalls for time as the soldiers dig up graves looking for the gold. A disgraced maquisard named Clemente (Dominiquie Vandenburg) attacks the little band, and eventually there’s only two soldiers left. Now they’re even more set on finding the gold, because they have so little to go back to. But they also have another problem in the form of Von Bruckner, who plans to collect the gold for himself when his company of SS soldiers passes the cemetery on their way to an escape route into Spain. The Germans are losing the war, and Von Bruckner’s looking out for number one. Can Marie play all of the angles and survive?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Hell Hath No Fury has some interesting parallels with David Ayers’ 2014 film Fury. Both tell stories of soldiers frustrated and left compromised by the coming end of hostilities; in the case of Hell, add a civilian woman to the list of those left wanting by the war. Both also feature a small group of combatants taking on a much larger force, and both even include Americans operating German-made firearms. Timothy V. Murphy’s bitter noncom Jerry carries a StG 44 assault rifle, just like Brad Pitt’s tank commander in Fury, Don “Wardaddy” Collier.

Performance Worth Watching: Nina Bergman does fine work here as Marie. She’s the film’s conscience, its emotional center, and she fairly quakes with psychological weight of this awful war when the American soldiers start putting craniums on her head and impersonating William Tell.

Memorable Dialogue: The Major has just tried to justify his right to the Gold in typically American terms. (He even says “In gold we trust.”) She puts him in his place. “You think gold pulled from the teeth of Jews, wedding rings stolen from their cold hands, menorahs snatched from their fireplaces doesn’t come with a price? Look around you. I didn’t hide the gold for myself. I hid it because it’s cursed.”

Sex and Skin: A few filmy robes for Marie in flashbacks to her relationship with Von Bruckner.

Our Take: Hell Hath No Fury is undoubtedly a Second World War movie. But there’s more going on here than blood, guts, grunts and Krauts. With its concise cast of characters working in a limited setting, each of them harboring their obsessions and motivations, and featuring as it does a woman – a femme fatale, even – whose agenda boils down to proud self-preservation, Hell Hath No Fury often feels descended from suspenseful noirs like Key Largo or The Maltese Falcon. Money has replaced duty or even survival as the motivator for the American soldiers, and Von Bruckner is a Nazi, but a personally corrupt one at that, willing to rob his superiors and risk his men’s lives in service of selfish ends. And Marie, just once, wants a man in her life to do what he said he would. If she can redeem some of her dignity out of that, then maybe her arduous war journey will have been worth it.

Bergman, as Marie, is terrific, but Timothy V. Murphy is a standout, too, giving his soldier a grizzled jadedness that aligns well with someone working so far off the books. Also doing strong work here – and speaking his lines in English, German, and French –  is Daniel Bernhardt as the wicked Von Bruckner. Bernhardt is known primarily for his physical roles in fight sequence-heavy films like Atomic Blonde and John Wick, so it’s interesting to see him as the villainous lead.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Hell Hath No Fury is a small scale film with some strong performances and nice noir elements wrapped into its tale of people in war and the bad things they do.