Robert Hugues-Lambert

When Mermoz (1943) premiered in Paris on 3rd November 1943, no-one seemed to notice the conspicuous absence of its star, Robert Hugues-Lambert. Lambert had a good reason for not being there: He was in a concentration camp. Just a few weeks before the end of the shooting, Lambert had been arrested by the Gestapo in a gay bar and sent to Drancy concentration camp, just outside Paris. Without its main actor, the production was forced to close down. André Tranché, the producer, now facing bankruptcy, tried to have Lambert released but in vain. After several agonising (and costly) weeks, a replacement was found in the person of the newcomer Henri Vidal. All the remaining scenes were subsequently shot with Vidal (who looked uncannily like Lambert). But another problem soon arose: Vidal's voice didn't match Lambert's. The production shut down once again. But André Tranché managed to get in touch with Robert Hugues-Lambert in Drancy and begged him to record the dialogue from behind the camp's barbed-wired fence. Lambert accepted and a sound engineer, a boom and a microphone were secretly dispatched to Drancy where all the dialogues were recorded with the complicity of the camp's warden. The film was finally completed on schedule and released in November 1943. 'Mermoz' was his only film. Despite several other attempts to have him freed or transferred to another prison, Robert Hugues-Lambert was deported to Germany. He died in the German concentration camp of Gross Rosen (now Rogoznica, Poland) in March 1945.