Exciting Wartime Spy-Story In The Classic Hitchcock Tradition

Rating: 6/10 (19 February 2006)

Barry Kane is an aircraft-factory worker during wartime, who is falsely accused of arson by a man called Fry, the real saboteur. Fleeing the authorities, Barry is befriended by Patricia, who comes to believe in his innocence. Together, they try to find the mysterious Fry; the search leads into a dizzying world of high-society spies and fifth-columnists, culminating in a fight atop the Statue of Liberty ...
This is a big sweep of a film, employing Hitchcock's beloved double-hunt structure - the hero hunts the killer while the cops hunt him (see The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, many others) - to particularly good effect. In an era of mistrust and finger-pointing, the story charms us with kindly, down-to-earth people who believe Barry's story (a friendly truck-driver, a blind pianist, a troupe of circus freaks) and terrifies us with a wealthy social-set whose disdain for freedom and the common good is as tawdry as their opulent lifestyles. Whilst less well-known than many of his other films, almost all of Hitch's trademarks are here; the handcuffed hero, the ice-cool blonde, the dead-eyed cops, the wacky sense of humour, nail-biting suspense scenes (a bomb at a shipyard, a note for help thrown out of a skyscraper window, a shootout in a cinema), even the climax at a public landmark. Perhaps its only weakness is the cast; Cummings is okay in the lead (he also starred in Hitch's later Dial M For Murder) but he lacks charisma and humour, chief villain Kruger is a little too smugly self-satisfied and Lane starts off as a feisty ingenue but sort-of gets forgotten about. There are some nice supporting bits though by Glaser as Barry's Delius-loving savant and Lloyd (an old pal of Orson Welles and John Houseman) as the enigmatic Mr Fry. Its strength however is in the superb direction and the fantastic script by no less than three great writers; Peter Viertel (who wrote White Hunter Black Heart), Joan Harrison (who wrote Hitch's three previous films) and the inimitable New Yorker critic and scribe, Dorothy Parker. Whilst this is not Hitchcock's best film by a long shot, it's still pretty unmissable and plants the seeds for many of the great movies he was to make in the fifties. Check it out, if only to see a film that is both a time-capsule of American wartime propaganda and a highly-entertaining spy story.