THE YELLOW CANARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 295, 16 February 1945, Page 19

THE YELLOW CANARY

(R.K.O.-British)

HIS satisfactory British spy thriller may keep you guessing for a good while, unless you make up your mind at the outset that an

actress who has twice portrayed Queen Victoria and once Edith Cavell could never descend so low as to help the Nazis to bomb Buckingham Palace and blow the port of Halifax to blazes. If you do so decide, your faith in Anna Neagle’s immaculate integrity will eventually be fully justified. It will, however, often be sorely tested, for the whole purpose of this melodrama during most of its length is to build up Miss Neagle in the character of a fifth columnist of the rankest sort. She appears as Sally Maitland ("Sally from Unter den Linden’), and if audiences see in this Nordic beauty some resemblance to a certain Unity FreemanMitford they will probably be doing no more than the producers, intended, in spite of the disclaimer at the beginning. Sally has spent several years in Germany, has reputedly been the girl friend of Hitler and Goering; she breaks her

patriotic parents’ hearts and enrages her Wren sister by saying awful things about the Allied war effort; and what’s worse, she is caught by a couple of literary minded firewatchers in the opening scene directing a Nazi bomber to Buckingham Palace by flashing a torch. Or rather, she isn’t caught, but that’s what she’s doing. Yet, instead Of applying Regulation 18b, the authorities ship Sally off to Canada for the duration, with a nice young naval commander (Richard Greene, incognito) to keep an eye on her. On the way over, .a porthole is opened in the blackout and up pop a submarine and a German raider — but Sally is allowed to reach her destina-tion-because, of course, that’s exactly what the Nazis want her to do. And, if you haven’t guessed, that’s exactly what the British authorities want, too. Canada, it would appear, contains a small but very efficient spy ring (beware of the man who examines your passport as you enter!). With her bona fides as an admirer of the Reich satisfactorily established, Sally is soon on the inside of it. But things, as I have’ been trying to suggest, are by no means what they seem, and although Sally is shot, it is not by a firing-squad. Nor is the shooting fatal. Nothing, in fact, stands in the way of Miss Neagle’s making a third film as Queen Victoria.