Documentary News Letter (1940)

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DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER NOVEMBER 1940 FILM OF THE MONTH 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 propa gandist 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. LONDON CAN TAKE IT! Being the commentary of the film of that name reviewed on page 14 of this issue, Commentator: Quentin Reynolds, War Correspondent, Collier's Weekly. Reproduced by permission of the Ministry of Information Films Division and the G.P.O. Film Unit. I AM SPEAKING from London. It is late afternoon and the people of London are preparing for the night. Everyone is anxious to get home before darkness falls — before our nightly visitors arrive. This is the London rush hour. Many of the people at whom you are looking now are members of the greatest civilian army ever to be assembled. These men and women who have worked all day in offices or in markets, are now hurrying home to change into the uniform of their particular service. The dusk is deepening. Listening crews are posted all the way from the coast to London to pick up the drone of the German planes. Soon the nightly battle of London will be on. This has been a quiet day for us; but it won't be a quiet night. We haven't had a quiet night for more than five weeks. They'll be over to-night and they'll destroy a few buildings and kill a few people. Probably some of the people you are watching now. Now they're going into the public shelters. This is not a pleasant way to spend the night, but the people accept it as their part in the defence of London. These civilians are good soldiers. Now it's eight o'clock. Jerry's a little bit late to-night. The searchlights are in position. The guns are ready. The People's Army of volunteers is ready. They arc the ones who are really fighting th^s war. The firemen, the air-raid wardens, the ambulance drivers. And there's the wail of the banshee . . . The nightly siege of London has begun. The city is dressed for battle. Here they come. Now