Movies
I saw the first hour of Fritz Lang’s “Hangmen also Die” (United Artists, 1943) tonight. The story, inspired by Reinhard Heydrich’s shooting in Prague in 1942, was a collaboration between Lang and Bertolt Brecht. The film is good, but 135 minutes of wartime stereotypes is a lot. 📽️
📽️ I enjoyed “The Cape Town Affair” (South Africa, 1967), starring Claire Trevor, James Brolin, and Jacquelin Bisset. I’ve never been to that part of the world, so seeing the city in this period was doubly interesting. The level of segregation, however, stood out, as did the unsettling naturalness of its portrayal.
The film is a spy story involving mainly white people of different social classes and ages. The one exception is the Communist ringleader, who appears only two or three times and presents as East Asian. This world of espionage inadvertently becomes entangled with less reputable characters who live by their own, less unsavory codes.
The film is a remake of the New York City noir “Pickup on South Street” (USA, 1953), which I haven’t seen.
📽️ Watched “Affair in Trinidad” (Columbia Pictures, 1952), a murder–spy story starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Was fun despite the usual noir gender normativity. Also interesting to see the early fictional appearance of a ballistic missile threat in the Caribbean.
📽️ The last time I saw “Three Days of the Condor,” dir. Sydney Pollack (Paramount, 1975), was long enough ago that I didn’t get as much out of its mid-seventies paranoia about the CIA as I did this time around. Or maybe it just didn’t gnaw away at me like it’s doing now. I grew up in a small rural town, but the grit in that movie pervaded a lot of popular television culture. I also heard my fair share of conspiracy-theory talk during my teens. Besides, the CIA was in the news.
I’m still not sure what to make of the mentality expressed in this film. It’s interesting, in any case, to speculate about how anti-establishment images and paranoia from the period have mapped onto both ends of our political spectrum.
"Maybe there's another CIA inside the CIA."
"Oil fields."
"We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do."
"How do you know they'll print it?"
📽️ Am watching “So Ends Our Night,” dir. John Cromwell (United Artists, 1941), a “story of people without passports” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1939 novel Flotsam.
A great line early on spoken by an Austrian police officer sending two stateless Germans across the border to Czechoslovakia in 1937:
You refugees! It’s not like handling a first-class criminal. You’re detracting from the dignity of my profession.
📽️ Watched a post–Cold War episode to the Harry Palmer films, “Bullet to Beijing” (1995). Michael Caine, the lead in the 1960s films, plays an agent pushed into early retirement who freelances for a Russian oligarch-mobster. It was interesting to revisit the period’s pop cultural images of Russia.
📽️ This evening I saw “Secret Agent,” dir. Alfred Hitchcock (UK, 1936). It was a box office hit in its time, but for me it’s less compelling than “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1936) and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934). The cinematography and moments of suspense were nonetheless entertaining and characteristically Hitchcock.
Unlike the protagonists in the other two movies, who become involved in espionage by chance and are clearly the good guys, the protagonists in this film play morally ambiguous roles. Their mission is to locate an enemy agent in Switzerland and assassinate him before he can carry British military secrets to the Ottomans. Only the playful, but dark character played by Peter Lorre enjoys the necessary close-up work of killing.
Silhouettes of hanged spies out a train window on the way through enemy territory underline the ultimate personal price during war, if caught. A Swiss hotel and casino serves as a glamorous counterpoint, with social banter, dress, and flirting more in line with the 1930s than 1916. That means viewers are treated to Madeleine Carroll’s bare shoulders while she is wrapped in a towel that covers the rest of her body in a scene with two men in full dress.
Distributor advertisement targeting cinema owners in The Film Daily, June 23, 1936, p. 3, via Internet Archive.
📽️ I watched “The King’s Speech” (2010) for the first time. It certainly lives up to all the praise it received 15 years ago.
📽️ Just watched “Berlin Correspondent,” dir. Eugene Forde (20th Century Fox, 1942). It’s not so much about a reporter as it is about the Gestapo’s efforts to uncover his spying and then beat his escapes. Interesting to me were the overt references to euthanasia or “mercy killings” in the film.
Here, though, the commander of such a facility jokes about Germany soon being “100% insanity free”—nice irony for a wartime U.S. audience, but maybe less funny to 21st-century ears. In any case, the quick-thinking American journalist outwits the Gestapo. The tone doesn’t feel too far removed from the 1960s TV sitcom, “Hogan’s Heroes” (1965–71).
📽️ For thievery and spying escapades set in the Blitz, “Counter-Espionage” (aka “The Lone Wolf in Scotland Yard”) dir. Edward Dmytryk (Columbia Pictures, 1942), isn’t bad. If its light tone, despite its air raids and bombs, seems out of place, it was produced for a wartime public in need of good tales.
By the way, the film has an odd science fiction component to it, though I have no idea how believable it would have been to the audience. First, there were plans for a lethal blue ray contraption (military figures in Berlin spoke of directional rays). Second, the spy ring transmitted information to Berlin with a large device that more or less functioned like a wireless fax. Finally, these people communicated between London and Berlin over the radio by voice.
📽️ I enjoyed “Diplomatic Courier,” dir. Henry Hathaway (20th Century Fox, 1952) this evening, available at archive.org… and youtu.be…. There were airplanes, trains, and cars from Washington to Salzburg to Trieste. One interesting twist for me: One of the leads was Hildegard Knef, who starred in the 1946 DEFA film “Die Mörder sind unter uns” (The Murderers Are Among Us).
📽️ After watching Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 “Rome Open City” (Roma città aperta) this weekend, I’ve started on his “Paisan” (1946). This is only the second time I’ve seen this remarkable collection of six stories about soldiers and civilians during the Allied liberation of Italy, and it feels raw.
📽️ Watched “Il conformista” [The Conformist], dir. Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1970). The first half stitches together vignettes to make the character who joined the secret police. Then we see him on a job in interwar France. The denouement comes after Mussolini’s dismissal is announced on the radio.
🇺🇦 Friends of Ukraine might learn something from how the Second World War was portrayed in American movie theaters before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Britain and its friends did important publicity work to open Americans' eyes and to counter the poison of the fascist German American Bund.
📽️ “Conclave,” dir. Edward Berger (USA/UK, 2024), is one helluva good movie. Made differently, the same story could have yielded a drama, but here it is a thriller, driven by dialog, cinematography, and sound—with superb use of space, ceremony, and costumes.
📽️ “Cloak and Dagger,” dir. Fritz Lang (Warner Bros., 1946), is good as a thriller and as a war film. Unfortunately, it never develops its initial premise, the race to develop the atomic bomb.
Given that the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1946, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge about weaponized applied nuclear physics would have been politically problematic anyway.
Fighting fascism, however, was a-okay. So were women serving as counterintelligence agents and partisans in this early Atomic Era film. Gary Cooper stars as an American physicist turned agent, who falls for a gun-toting Italian played by Lilli Palmer.
📽️ If you want to watch a thriller set in 1939 before Germany’s invasion of Poland, “Man Hunt,” dir. Fritz Lang (20th Century Fox, 1941), holds up. Only the ending was unsatisfactory, if appropriate to a time when embattled Britain needed Americans to understand what was going on.
📽️ Watched “‘Pimpernel’ Smith,” dir. Leslie Howard (British National Films, 1941), which imagines The Scarlet Pimpernel set in Germany in 1939.
📽️ I am really enjoying Irene Dunne in her old comedies, most recently “Lady in a Jam,” dir. Gregory La Cava (Universal, 1942). It involves a lost fortune and a psychiatrist too sure of his professional knowledge, which he posits has a kind of mathematical accuracy. Love, however, has other ideas.
“Theodora Goes Wild,” dir. Richard Boleslawski (Columbia Pictures, 1936) is great fun. It roasts performative morality, gossip, and small-mindedness. The main attraction, though, is Irene Dunne, who soon comes to handle it all with aplomb.
📽️ A well reviewed historical drama is streaming on Paramount+ in the United States: “Suffragette,” dir. Sarah Gavron (UK, 2015). The struggle it dramatizes was about getting the vote in order to shape the laws and policies that affected women in uniquely cruel ways.