Movies
📽️ 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.
'The Iron Curtain' (1948 Spy Film)
📽️ Tonight I watched “The Iron Curtain,” dir. William A. Wellman (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1948). The film was based on Igor Gouzenko’s memoir of his time working as a military cypher expert in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, “I Was Inside Stalin’s Spy Ring,” Hearst’s International–Cosmopolitan (February–May 1947).
Related News from 1948
The excerpt below from a news item in a trade journal uses the term “appeasement” to describe attempts to block the film’s release. And it recalls accusations “of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films” before the U.S. entry into World War Two. Disinformation campaigns by hostile governments are nothing new, it seems.
MPAA Pins Red Label on “Curtain” Protest
Reaffirming his continued resistance to any attempts to dictate what appears or does not appear on the screen, Eric A. Johnston, MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] president, has rejected the protest of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship against release of 20th-Fox’s forthcoming “The Iron Curtain.” At the same time Johnston questioned the motives of the National Council and coneluded that “the purpose of your organization is to create in this country an atmosphere of appeasement and acceptance of Russia’s policy of aggression and expansion."…
Johnston pointed out … that the issue of free speech in relation to the screen was challenged seven years ago before a Senate committee, when the producers were accused of war-mongering because of alleged anti-Nazi films. “Producers then insisted upon and maintained their constitutional right to make films on any subject, free from dictation,” Johnston reminded. “Their position was vindicated. They stand on that right today, and I back them up."…
Source: The Film Daily February 3, 1948, p. 5.
📽️ I had fun watching the pre-Code “This is the Night,” dir. Frank Tuttle (Paramount, 1932). Its primary purpose was to be a bit racy and full of laughs. (Thelma Todd’s character loses her dress more than once, catching it in a car door, in a cabinet drawer, and on a fence…) The story begins in Paris, before moving to Venice. It is free of fascism, despite the Italian setting, but the incorruptible protagonist played by Lili Damita is clearly hungry in an early scene, a Depression-related circumstance to which the wealthy men appear oblivious. The comedy takes enough twists and turns that it’s not clear who will end up with who for much of the time.
Advertisement from The Film Daily (January–June 1932).
📽️ Watched “The Deadly Affair,” dir. Sidney Lumet (UK, 1967), a spy thriller based on John le Carré’s 1961 debut novel, Call for the Dead. Quincy Jones did the musical soundtrack. Good stuff.
📽️ Watched an antifascist drama set in the time before the United States was at war with Germany, “Watch on the Rhine,” dir. Herman Shumlin (USA, 1943). Despite the title, it takes place around the U.S. capitol, except for an initial border crossing from Mexico and a train to Washington.