Notable cast/crew: Joel McCrea as John Jones. Laraine Day as Carol Fisher. Herbert Marshall as Stephen Fisher. George Sanders as ffolliott. Edmund Gwenn as Rowley (his third Hitchcock film). Robert Benchley as Stebbins. Ian Wolfe as Stiles.
Running time: 120 minutesDirector: Alfred Hitchcock
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| Lining up a killer shot |
Jones is sent to Amsterdam to cover Van Meer's peace conference which is attempting to avoid war in Europe. Standing in the rain on the crowded steps of the hall, he witnesses Van Meer assassinated by a photographer who hid a gun beside his camera. Jones gives chase hopping in a car with Carol and ffolliott. They wind up losing them out in the Dutch countryside amidst windmills.
Jones sends Carol and ffolliott off to get the police when he notices one of the windmills turning in the wrong direction. He stays to investigate and finds the spies holed up inside, and they have Van Meer alive. They had an impostor assassinated to hide the fact that they had kidnapped Van Meer. He has knowledge vital to prevent the spread of war in Europe: knowledge of an agreement in Clause 27 of a secret pact. They have drugged Van Meer making it impossible to free him, but Jones escapes and brings back the police. They find the windmill abandoned except for a bum who is really one of the spies which leads everyone to doubt Jones' story.
Jones and Carol return to London to find one of the spies meeting with her father. Unknown to them, her father is part of the spy network. Fisher pretends to help Jones by offering a bodyguard, Rowley, who is really a hit man for the spies. Rowley fabricates the idea of there being spies on their tail and talks Jones into ducking into Westminster Cathedral to hide from them. He tries to push Jones from the steeple, but Jones dodges him, sending Rowley to his death.
ffolliott, it turns out, had known about Fisher and had followed the spies back from Holland. He joins Jones in investigating the connections in order to find Van Meer and break the story. ffolliott comes up with a scheme to fake a kidnap of Carol in order to make Fisher do their bidding. Carol flubs the plot when she comes home while ffolliott is trying to get Fisher to give him the address where Van Meer is being held. He gets a break when Fisher leaves to interrogate Van Meer, and ffolliott follows him.
Van Meer won't talk until he is tortured, and ffolliott is forced to watch. Jones arrives and helps rescue Van Meer, but Fisher escapes with the information he needed. ffolliott and jones leave for America to try to intercept Fisher. War is declared with Germany while they're flying over the Atlantic. Fisher gets wind that he is going to be arrested once they land, and he comes clean to Carol. The plane is shot down by a German ship and crashes into the ocean. All of the survivors make it to an airplane wing, but there are too many for it to support their weight. Fisher decides to jump off while they argue and drowns rather than face his fate. They're rescued by an American ship, and Jones gets the story back to New York. The movie closes with a broadcast from Jones to America warning them that war is coming, and America must get ready.
MacGuffin: Clause 27
Hitchcock cameo: Walking past a hotel reading a newspaper
Hitchcock themes:
- Murder
- Spies
Verdict: This is a decent war-time picture, but it runs a little long. It's clearly a propaganda film meant to encourage the war effort in America. Many of Hitchcock's films pre-WW2 focus on spies and the German war movement, and in this, as in The Lady Vanishes, an openly pacifist character that thinks they can stop hostilities just by telling the enemy to stop gets shot in mid-sentence and made to look the fool. It's clear which side Hitchcock came down on. There are not so subtle hints throughout the film such as Jones breaking a HOTEL EUROPE sign accidentally leaving HOT EUROPE. Also, there is a shot in the windmill where an impressionistic image of Hitler is painted on a wooden beam above the spies standing under it making it clear who they are working for. The "peace" party turns out to be a front for German spies, again reinforcing the message that those who refuse to stand up to the enemy and actively work to prevent action against it are nothing more than patsies for them.
The film has two memorable sequences: the assassination and the plane crash. The assassination is iconic with its crowds of men and their umbrellas standing in the rain as the cameraman kills Van Meer's doppleganger in front of everyone. The chase through the crowd showing just the umbrellas moving as someone runs by is very well done. For the plane crash, footage taken from a stunt plane diving over the ocean was rear projected on rice paper in front of the cockpit set, while behind the rice paper were two chutes connected to large water tanks. The chutes were aimed at the windshield of the cockpit, so that water would break through the rice paper at the right moment, simulating the crash of the plane into the ocean. When the shipwreck sequence was shot, a special tub within the studio tank had to be built for Herbert Marshall (Fisher), who couldn't swim because he only had one leg (he'd lost the other in combat in World War I).
Hitchcock's eccentric marriage proposal to his wife, Alma, was recreated in the film in the scene when Jones proposes to Carol.
Robert Benchley was allowed to write his own lines. He was a well-known comedian/humorist of the time and provided a bit of comic relief. George Sanders is excellent, as always, this time playing the hero instead of the oily cad like in Rebecca. Albert Bassermann (Van Meer) couldn't speak a word of English and learned all his lines phonetically. He is riveting in the scene when Fisher interrogates him. That scene really draws you in and leaves you spellbound as he denounces those who foment war and how they will destroy themselves and leave the world to the little, peaceful people. Gary Cooper turned down the lead role, later admitting he had made a mistake. Joel McCrea is okay in the role, but he's a little weak to carry the leading man. The role really gets split between him and Sanders as to who the hero of the film is.
Out of five bananas, I give it:
The film has two memorable sequences: the assassination and the plane crash. The assassination is iconic with its crowds of men and their umbrellas standing in the rain as the cameraman kills Van Meer's doppleganger in front of everyone. The chase through the crowd showing just the umbrellas moving as someone runs by is very well done. For the plane crash, footage taken from a stunt plane diving over the ocean was rear projected on rice paper in front of the cockpit set, while behind the rice paper were two chutes connected to large water tanks. The chutes were aimed at the windshield of the cockpit, so that water would break through the rice paper at the right moment, simulating the crash of the plane into the ocean. When the shipwreck sequence was shot, a special tub within the studio tank had to be built for Herbert Marshall (Fisher), who couldn't swim because he only had one leg (he'd lost the other in combat in World War I).
Hitchcock's eccentric marriage proposal to his wife, Alma, was recreated in the film in the scene when Jones proposes to Carol.
Robert Benchley was allowed to write his own lines. He was a well-known comedian/humorist of the time and provided a bit of comic relief. George Sanders is excellent, as always, this time playing the hero instead of the oily cad like in Rebecca. Albert Bassermann (Van Meer) couldn't speak a word of English and learned all his lines phonetically. He is riveting in the scene when Fisher interrogates him. That scene really draws you in and leaves you spellbound as he denounces those who foment war and how they will destroy themselves and leave the world to the little, peaceful people. Gary Cooper turned down the lead role, later admitting he had made a mistake. Joel McCrea is okay in the role, but he's a little weak to carry the leading man. The role really gets split between him and Sanders as to who the hero of the film is.
Out of five bananas, I give it:
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