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Shining Through is a 1992 American World War II drama film which was released to United States cinemas on January 31, 1992, written and directed by David Seltzer and starring Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith, with Liam Neeson, Joely Richardson and John Gielgud in supporting roles. It is based on the 1988 novel by Susan Isaacs. The original music score was composed by Michael Kamen.
Ed and Linda travel to Switzerland, where he hands her over to elderly master spy Konrad Friedrichs, who takes her into Germany by train. He hides her in his house in Berlin and introduces her to his niece, Margrete von Eberstein, a socialite also working as an Allied agent. Linda assumes the identity of Lina Albrecht, a cook planted in the household of Horst Drescher, a social-climbing Nazi officer. He is throwing an important party, but she arrives too late to prepare the food properly, causing the dinner to be a disaster. Drescher angrily fires her. Walking dejectedly on a dark street, alone and after curfew, Linda bumps into a guest from the dinner, officer Franze-Otto Dietrich, who is charmed by her and mistakenly believes she already had a Gestapo security check. Dietrich is a widower and takes Linda/"Lina" on as a nanny to his two children. Between her duties as a servant, she searches Dietrich's house for confidential papers on the V1, which he is also working on. She intends to photograph them, but can find nothing.
Meanwhile, Ed, sick with worry about Linda since her disappearance from Drescher's party, suddenly chances to see her in a newsreel of Hitler in a parade in Berlin. Ed's agents identify Dietrich as the man standing next to Linda in the film, and Ed heads to Germany to rescue her. Because he does not speak German, he assumes the identity of a wounded high-ranking German officer, who had his throat injured and cannot speak. He tracks down Linda and tells her she must leave with him immediately, but Linda reveals that she has located her Jewish cousins, excitedly telling Ed and Margrete how nearby they are. She demands Ed give her another day to visit them and give them hope. The next day, with the children in her care, Linda tracks down her relatives' hiding place in the city, but finds it empty and ransacked, as they have just been captured. When an Allied air raid suddenly hits, Linda has to run for cover with the children and protect them. Back at the house, the frightened boy inadvertently reveals the existence of a hidden room in Dietrich's basement. Linda sneaks down there that night and finds and surreptitiously photographs Dietrich's top secret V-1 rocket blueprints. Dietrich nearly catches her, before he reveals he has fallen in love with Linda and invites her to the opera. While there, Linda's cover is blown when Margrete's mother recognizes her, believing Linda to be a friend of her daughter's from college. Dietrich is heartbroken and, once back at his house, Linda sees him loading his gun.
Fearing for her life, Linda flees across the house and finds sanctuary with Margrete. Linda catches Margrete using a pay phone on the street to report in to her Gestapo superiors. Margrete shoots Linda and reveals she is a double agent, who betrayed the agent Linda replaced, causing his death, and also revealed the location of Linda's Jewish cousins to the Gestapo. The two struggle and Linda, although wounded, overpowers Margrete and kills her. Linda hides in the laundry chute, escaping the German forces who raid Margrete's apartment.
Badly wounded, Linda is found by Ed and Friedrichs, who take her to the railway station. Ed and Linda travel to the Swiss-German border. Linda is unconscious from blood loss, barely alive, and Ed's travel papers have expired. Ed's mute act fails to sway the border guards, forcing him to shoot his way out. Carrying Linda, he struggles toward the border. The German sniper guarding it shoots and wounds him twice, but he gets himself and Linda across before collapsing. Back in the present, Linda reveals that while she and Ed recovered from their injuries in a Swiss hospital, the microform of the secret German documents was retrieved from a hiding place inside her glove, and the Allies successfully bombed the V1 installation. Ed then walks out to join the interview, and they reveal they have been happily married ever since.
Because all of Berlin's great train stations were destroyed in World War II, the production traveled over to Leipzig at the end of October to shoot scenes in the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof terminus, built in 1915 and the largest in Europe. This was prior to the building's modernization by the Deutsche Bahn.
The finale, set at a border crossing and involving a period train, was shot in Maria Elend, Carinthia, Austria, in November 1990.
The New York City and Washington scenes at the beginning of the film were shot in and around London and at nearby Pinewood Studios. Locations included the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Hammersmith, and St Pancras Station, which doubled for Zurich Station for a brief sequence set in Switzerland.
Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, "I know it's only a movie, and so perhaps I should be willing to suspend my disbelief, but Shining Through is such an insult to the intelligence that I wasn't able to do that. Here is a film in which scene after scene is so implausible that the movie kept pushing me outside and making me ask how the key scenes could possibly be taken seriously."
Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times that the first three-quarters of Susan Isaacs's book "never made it to the screen," including Linda Voss's love affair and marriage to her New York law firm boss, John Berringer. "David Seltzer's film version of Shining Through manages to lose also the humor of Susan Isaacs's savvy novel. Even stranger than that is the film's insistence on jettisoning the most enjoyable parts of the story."
The film is listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made.
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