Foreign Correspondent

Saw Foreign Correspondent (thanks, Anne!) It was a glorious old Hitchcock film set just before England is pulled into the second world war. The protagonist must foil a budding German plot to pull England into war but we know of course that his mission is doomed. The film was mostly a taut action/drama, ratcheting up the intrigue and the stakes unto geopolitical levels. Like a good mystery, it uses ingenious solutions and the exploitation of social conventions to foil the villains. The backdrop of just-barely-prewar England is ingenious and well drawn, the characters well acted and the plot knotty and twisting. I loved it.

The film is made in the 40s for American audiences. Hitchcock no doubt wanted America to join the war effort but understood that this was not a popular opinion. Thus, the film is strangely equivocal for a WW2 film. The Brits are the true heroes but the main villain is an aristocratic sort of German and even behaves selflessly and nobly, just at the very end. About that ending too: the whole film has been this elaborate dance in hotel lobbies and train cars, far removed from the actual realities of fighting and war until, fleeing the country in an airplane and still engaging in back-room intrigues, suddenly the war becomes very real and inescapable. What was a clever word-game becomes a bloody reality. Just a wonderful scene. Then, as though we had not been given enough gifts in this film, we get a gloriously over-sincere speech from the protagonist about how the lights have all gone out in England, that the lights in America must be kept burning, so ring them with guns and cover them with a canopy of battleships! And the credits roll as the chorus lauches into a mighty "Oh say does tha-at star spangled banner yet waaaave?" Just glorious.

The film's great. It's Hitchcock. What can I say? Such great 1940s declamations and overwrought, dainty references to sex. The film is kind of campy in parts but this just adds to my enjoyment of it. Such a fun film!