They Staked Their Lives, completedjust after the outbreak of the war, was immersed in a fatalisticrealization of its time. In the guise of an adventure story, the filmdeals with tyranny and resistance in an unspecified Baltic country thatis obviously a police state. Frequent quarrels among the resistanceagents do not bode well for eventual liberation. The film, as PeterCowie points out, compares with the poetic realism of theCarné-Prévert films in France, and with Graham Greene'sbooks of the period. But its theme of individuals inadvertently caughtup in a net of power, and the realization of this dilemma in visualterms, is purely Sjöberg. Here, "Sjöberg reveals himselfa master not only at composing his shots, but also at asserting therhythm of the film." (Cowie) "°eclectic and brilliant°"(Edgardo Cozarinsky)