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Documentary News Letter (1940) - Film of the Month: Foreign Correspondent

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FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT.

Producer: Walter Wanger. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Cast: Joel Macrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, Albert Basserman, George Sanders, Edmund Gvvenn, Eduardo Cianelli, and Robert Benchley.

IN HIS LONG career in British Studios all Hitchcock's best films were thrillers (The Lodger, Blackmail, Murder, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes), while his least successful efforts were films such as Rich and Strange, The Skin Game, Jamaica Inn, and so on. Many critics used to say what a shame it was that Hitchcock's enormous directorial talent never seemed to click with the treatment of serious themes; though they should perhaps have been content to enjoy the aforementioned thrillers for what they were — exciting stories treated in an original and stimulating way. For after all, whether you like thrillers or not, Hitchcock has a genius for film making, and the British film industry has never been overcrowded with genius.

Then Hitchcock went to Hollywood and it would seem that the wider resources and the more deeply established traditions of Hollywood have given him new powers. Apart from better script departments and wider studio facilities, however, it is probable that what has really happened is that Hitchcock has at last got what he never had here — a proper producer. In Rebecca (producer: Zanuck) he did bring off a non-thriller subject; the imaginative qualities of several sequences — especially that which opened the film — were something which the previous Hitchcock films had never more than hinted at.

In Foreign Correspondent we have Hitchcock working with Walter Wanger; and Wanger is known as Hollywood's most alert and liberalminded producer. The result is a thriller which, as a thriller, is the best that Hitchcock has ever done and which, for various reasons, is at moments something very much more than a thriller. The main reason, one may guess, is that Wanger saw in the war set-up the possibility of linking the thrill-story — usually an artificial concoction — to an all-time actual sensation like the European conflict. That is, he saw the chance of placing Hitchcock's superb shocker technique over against something which was not only a shocker but also hideously real. Hitchcock saw the chance and took it.

The story tells of a young American journalist (Joel Macrae) who is sent to Europe in 1939 to be in on the crisis. He duly gets entangled in a series of terrific adventures, involving one Fischer (Herbert Marshall), who runs a Peace Society as a cover for Fifth Column activities; his daughter (Laraine Day); and a Dutch statesman named van Meer (Albert Basserman) who is kidnapped, and the search for whom takes up much of the film. Highlights of the film include an assassination in the rain at The Hague, with the murderer's departure marked only by disturbed ripples on a great sea of umbrellas; a superb suspense sequence in a windmill; Macrae's narrow escape from being pushed off the tower of Westminster Cathedral by a hired assassin (Edmund Gwenn); a cleverly observed Peace Lunch at the Savoy; a torture scene in an upper room in Charlotte Street; a comedy sequence in a Cambridge Hotel; and a flying-boat crash in mid-Atlantic.

It is great fun to find Herbert Marshall and Edmund Gwenn cast as villains; and they team up well with Cianelli, who has been doing screen scoundrels for years. Robert Benchley is admirable as a boozing London correspondent off the booze, and there is also a charming sketch by another actor (whose name escapes me) of a madly beaming and bewildered Latvian diplomat. And Hitchcock himself contributes a massive and Epstein-like study of "Man Reading Paper on Sidewalk". But the best acting comes from Albert Basserman and George Sanders.

Throughout most of the film the close-packed incidents are given added urgency by the imminent presence of war, and the last part of the film takes place after war has begun. The transatlantic flying boat (complete with hero, heroine, friends and villains) is shot down by a Nazi warship. The nose-dive and crash is terrifically exciting — chiefly because it is all shot from within the flying boat, and as a result the audience can take part in the authentic and actual terror of aerial disaster.

There remains for consideration the propagandist element of the film; for, quite apart from the atmosphere of real urgency already referred to, there are two points at least where direct statements of idea are made. The first is when Van Meer, under third degree in a Charlotte Street attic, recognises through the aching glare of the lights, his friend Fischer — revealed now as a traitor to the cause of peace. Speaking slowly and under great physical stress (Basserman is superb here) he identifies this single Fifth Columnist with all traitors to humanity everywhere, with those financiers and politicians and autocrats and industrialists who — cynically or stupidly (it doesn't matter which) — engineer death and misery for the peoples of the world. The speech is very strong meat indeed, and Hitchcock, presumably, only gets away with it because of its melodramatic context.

The second piece of propaganda is the final sequence, which depicts Macrae broadcasting to the States during an air-raid on London, with the lights fading out as he makes an impassioned plea to Americans to keep their own lights shining and to take action before it is too late. This sequence must certainly have been shot before the aerial blitzkrieg on Britain started, and one notices that it could be detached from the film and still leave a suitable finale. The actual event of the raid, with its falsetto sirens and somewhat unseemly B.B.C. panic can, therefore, be forgiven its inaccuracies of fact and of atmosphere. The importance of the sequence is that it is a message to the States  — and not to us — sent out by an American journalist and, in fact, conceived at script conferences at which Walter Wanger had the last word. It is neither a warlike nor a political piece of propaganda; it stimulates thought, and its message should strike home on the other side of the Atlantic; to us o\er here it does at least bring evidence of a goodwill backed by clear thinking.

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