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National Board of Rcviczc Magazine
The slioofing doz-Jii of the Clipper in mid-Atlantic
The man who holds the secret ever)-one is trying to learn is a Dutch diplomat, and it is around him that all the intrigue and adventure center. The swift rush of events is something like making a skijump over a rough course with l^umps and hollows in it that would trip you if you \\ ere not going so fast. Am pause to reason wh}-. or how, might be fatal, and Hitchcock gives his audience no chance to pause, until the crash of a flying clipper in mid-ocean, fired on by enemy guns, wrings the last squeeze of excitement out of the plot and the final scene of the reporter broadcasting from London amid darkness and falling bombs leaves a last impression of terrifying reality.
Foreign Correspondent is somewhere in the top brace of Hitchcock's masterpieces. Different people have different favorites, but here surely any Hitchcock fan will find plenty of what he is looking for. The L-atvian gentleman whose incomprehensible appearances and language might be sinister and certainly are funny, the Great Dane that is definitelv sinister, the garrulous and inora
tiating assassin, the Dutch windmill, the mysterious tramp, the shooting on the long flight of steps in The Hague that might have come right out of a news-reel, the attempted murder in the cathedral tower while a Requiem Mass is going on, the old woman on the sinking clipper, gentle-seeming people turning out to be villains, craft\ people turning out to be solidlv on the side of virtue, and lest this sort of deception should become too sure a cue, some people turning out to be just what they seem to be. Such things as these make Hitchcock pictures ^\■hat they are, along with such use of natui"al sound and music as Hitchcock has been a master at, just as he was a pioneer, ever since a sound-track was added to movie film.
Into this Hitchcock pattern fits, surprisingh' and patly, Robert Benchley. as Benchlev as ever. And of course there is the Hitchcock signature, like ^Miistler's butterfly — Hitchcock himself bustling unobtrusively through a scene. Don't confuse him with one of the taxi-drivers.
(Rated Exceptional) J. S. H.