Foreign Correspondent

 

Year: 1940.

Starring: Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Albert Basserman, Herbert Marshall, Edmund
                Gwenn.

Production: Walter Wanger.

Screenplay: Charles Bennett & Joan Harrison.

Photography: Robert Burks.

Music: Franz Waxman.

Duration: 120 min.

Color: B&W.

Cast:

Argument:

Johnny Jones is a lazy journalist, who gets a chance to work as a foreign correspondent in Europa, due to the possibility of War's beginning. Jones changes his name to Huntley Haverstock in order to appear more sophisticated and travels to London.

There he meets Professor Van Meer, a dutch diplomatist being aware of a secret peace agreement's clause between England and Germany, so Jones / Haverstock follows Van Meer as this last gets off to Amsterdam. Taking care of Van Meer are Stephen Fischer, who claims to be dirigent of a pacifist organization, and his daughter Carol.

While in Amsterdam, Van Meer is apparently shot dead. However Jones, with aid from Carol, will discover that Van Meer's murder was a fake, and that the true Professor is held captive by a secret enemy organization, who wants to know the secret clause, and to which Stephen Fischer belongs. After escaping that organization and setting Professor Van Meer free, Jones and Carol manage to return back to London, where Jones continues with his original job: to inform America about the eve of the war.

'Foreign Correspondent' contains many elements, which are typical from World War II propaganda pictures; this announced to certain extent the United States' enter into war. Although, this movie should not be simply reduced to a single propaganda movie: it's one of the brightest exponents of Hitchcock's style concerning the creation of suspense.

For this accounts the excellent realization, with an extremely careful scenario build, as well as the story's background: the mistery introduced around a peace agreement's secret clause, on which the whole war depends. It's upon this single point that the whole movie's coherence is based, and the key that enables Hitchcock to make us enter the secret agents' world (one of the movie's most attractive element).

Although, the end shows us clearly the propaganda side of this film. The final patriotic message can actually appear to be a bit irrelevant, almost a too clear signal of the director's intentions; but that point is rather obscure; it could be possible that the producer deliberatelly designed such an end, as happened one year later with 'Suspicion' or 1957 with 'The Wrong Man', when Hitchcock was forced to implement a determined end because of economic or even ideologic reasons (please jump to 'Suspicion' or 'The Wrong Man' to get more information).

The truth is that, in spite of those imposed limitations, this film showed clearly Hitchcock's creation abilities on turning the simplest ideas into extremely sophisticated arguments; 'Foreign Correspodent' was a further sucess of Hitchcock's filmography, following the immediately anterior 'Rebecca' and initiated a Golden Age of this genre, announcing future masterpieces like 'Suspicion', 'The Shadow of a Doubt', 'Spellbound' and 'Notorious'.