Winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics Award as Best Foreign Film in 1979, Soldier of Orange is based on the memoir of the same name by Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, one of the founders of the Dutch Resistance, aide to Queen Wilmelmina during her exile in England, and RAF Pathfinder pilot in the last days of the war. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the film dramatizes the traumatic effects of the Nazi occupation on Holland, and the often futile attempts to form a local Dutch Resistance.

Location scenes provide stunning realism--from the boisterous hazing of students in Leyden, where Hazelhoff (known in the film as Lanshof) was a law student, to the beach of Scheveningen, where Lanshof and his friends attempted to cross the Channel to England by small boat, and the streets of The Hague, where one of Lanshof's friends is seen late in the war.

Often said to be the best film ever made in Holland and the best film ever made by Paul Verhoeven, the film is also the best film ever made by Rutger Hauer, who plays the role of Lanshof with great panache. Jereoen Krabbe, playing his best friend, Guus LeJeune, is equally good in his role as a long-time friend from Leyden and hero of the Resistance. Focusing on these two men and four friends who react to the Occupation in different ways, the film brings to life the choices made by people in occupied Holland. Of the 144 who, like Lanshof and LeJeune, escaped and then made the decision to return to Holland to set up a Resistance, only 28 survived.

Beautifully photographed by Jost Vacano, the film gives a sense of the helplessness of Holland's small army against the Nazi juggernaut, the beauty of the countryside, and the victimization of the Dutch people as they faced subjugation. Though the torture scenes are graphic and brutal, the film is so well done and so involving that one even forgets the film has subtitles. Hazelhoff continues this story in his recent autobiography, In Pursuit of Life, which I strongly recommend, not only to fans of this film and the book which inspired it, but to anyone interested in fine writing and a fascinating life story.