FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 75, 29 November 1940, Page 51

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

(United Artists)

HEN Johnny Jones’s boss gives him the job of foreign correspondent in Europe it is because he is a good reporter and not an

economist, politician. or soothsayer. "1 don’t want sages or oracles to tell me what they think might happen," says the newspaper magnate. "I want a crime reporter-because there’s a mighty big crime cooking up in Europe." All newspaper readers who have longed for more facts and less prophecy will applaud this sentiment at the beginning of " Foreign Correspondent," but the story which Johnny Jones thereafter uncovers is as much a piece of colourful fiction as anything that has appeared in the papersand as exciting as only a Hitchcockdirected movie can be. "Foreign Correspondent" was, at the beginning, to have been based on fact -on Vincent Sheean’s "Personal History." Walter Wanger bought the rights for 10,000 dollars, but history moved too fast for Walter Wanger. By the time three writers had worked on producing a story with a Spanish Civil War background, the Spanish Civil War was over. Wanger started again, but this time Hitler caught up and passed him and went on into Poland. Finally Wanger turned it all over to Alfred Hitchcock, who engaged a new team of writers (including James "Mr. Chips" Hilton, Robert Benchley, and Ben Hecht). The result is not at all Vincent Sheean but very much Hitchcock. To my mind it is not quite Hitchcock at his very best, as he was, for instance, in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and " The Lady Vanishes," His technique is less clear-cut and leaves a good many loose ends to the plot which, if they care to be critical in retrospect, may bother people with tidy minds. What, for example, was that secret clause to the treaty which the German agents spent so much time kidnapping, murdering and torturing in order to discover? And it would have been interesting, for future reference, to have been told just how the Universal Peace Party imagined it could avert the war two days before it broke out. If I am inclined to criticise the vagueness of some of the purely imaginary details of the plot it is because the

director has been at such pains-and with very considerable success-to create an atmosphere of topicality and authenticity for his background of Europe on the eve of war. Johnny Jones, as played with ability by Joel McCrea, is the American newspaperman of screen tradition, and the adventures that befall him are, in essence, those that commonly befall newspapermen on the screen, whether they are covering gang warfare in Chicago or the effects of gangsterdom on a large scale in Europe. He has the usual good luck-when he bumps right into his "story " on his first day in Lon-don-and the usual bad luck when his quarry vanishes. Yet, as always, it is not so much Hitchcock’s basic material that counts as how he treats it. In "Foreign Correspondent"’ he has gearéd his tale of German agents using a " Peace" organisation as cover for their plotting to such a pitch of suspense that, in several parts the action is almost breath taking. There are the familiar Hitchcock tricks of technique-the innocent little details that are really so sinister, the unexpected flashes of comedy, the prolonging of climaxes (as when Edward Gwenn is about to push the hero from a tower, and when an air liner is crashing into the. sea) and the early ticketing of the villains (though my companion at the preview with me did find it hard to believe even at the end that such a nice man as Herbert Marshall could be a German spy). Best of all perhaps is the way Hitchcock places his cameras As usual Hitchcock is the star of his picture; but he has not, for that reason, neglected to provide a cast that has no weak members and several very strong ones. New faces well worth watching are Albert Bassermann as Van Meer, the kidnapped statesman who, somehow, was going to save Europe from war and who knew all about that vital treaty (very secret), and Laraine Day, who is seen as Herbert Marshall’s daughter, as innocent and idealistic as her screen parent is ruthless. The round-eyed Miss Day ranks with Joan Fontaine (of "Rebecca ") asa Hitchcock triumph in discovering unsuspected talent. And a final hand-clap for Robert Benchley who, as "Time" puts it, "is to the life what Robert Benchley undoubtedly would be if he had been a foreign correspondent in London for 25 years."