Alfred Hitchcock (1940)
This excellent film was Hitchcock’s second in America, released just four months after Rebecca. The BFI programme note was a piece written by James Naremore for The Criterion Collection, which accurately describes Foreign Correspondent as:
‘… akin to [Hitchcock’s] celebrated British chase films of the 1930s, a mixture of danger, romance and comedy set against a background of international intrigue … rather like a way station between The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959).’
One feature that distinguishes this picture from the two that Naremore mentions by name is the real urgency of its ‘background of international intrigue’. The story is set in the summer of 1939 and reaches its climax in the hours leading up to and following Britain’s declaration of war on Germany following the invasion of Poland. The ‘War in Europe’, as World War II still was at the time Foreign Correspondent was made, dominates the plotting and eventually takes over the film. In a postscript to the main action, the journalist hero Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) has returned to London as a war correspondent. He makes a radio broadcast to his fellow Americans as a Luftwaffe attack begins. Jones evokes Churchill’s ‘lights are going out’ speech of 1938 (itself an echo of Sir Edward Grey’s ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe’, on the eve of the Great War) as he urges his country to ‘keep the lights burning’ – as an air raid extinguishes them in the studio from which he’s broadcasting. The US national anthem accompanies the closing credits. The bombing of London actually started a few days after the premiere of Foreign Correspondent in August 1940.
The film includes several brilliant and exciting episodes. An assassination in Amsterdam, carried out by a gunman posing as a news photographer, his weapon concealed by his camera; the ensuing pursuit of the assassin under serried ranks of umbrellas; a sequence inside and outside a Dutch windmill whose sails move with an eerie sound and against the wind. The suspense of the repeated attempts made by a bogus bodyguard to push Johnny Jones to his death from the tower of Westminster Cathedral is nearly intolerable. These are all such highlights that the more extended climax – aboard an aircraft shelled over the Atlantic by a German destroyer, then in the ocean where the survivors keep afloat on the plane’s wreckage – is at risk of being an anti-climax, though it’s remarkably coherent and, for a film nearly eighty years old, convincing. Foreign Correspondent is consistently atmospheric, right from the opening shots of the NYC skyline and the somewhat sci-fi-ominous look of the building that houses the offices of the fictional New York Globe.
The Globe’s editor (Harry Davenport) is worried by the political crisis in Europe and frustrated that his readers aren’t getting a penetrating account of it. He decides the skills of an investigative reporter are needed and that Johnny Jones is the man for the job. Crime reporter Jones is so hands-on that he punched a policeman in the course of his latest journalistic coup; when he’s summoned to the editor’s office, he expects the sack rather than a foreign correspondent assignment in Europe, under the pen name Huntley Haverstock. There are few actors I enjoy watching more than Joel McCrea. His humorous, straight-as-a-die innocence and unshowy intrepidity enable him easily to manage the different registers of the action. Though their shipboard marriage proposal scene together is lovely, Laraine Day is, for the most part, rather a dreary romantic partner for McCrea. To be fair to Day, the script requires Carol Fisher to make such abrupt transitions in her feelings about Jones-Haverstock that it’s hard for her to create a stable character.
Carol is the daughter of Herbert Marshall’s Stephen Fisher, leader of the ‘Universal Peace Party’: he turns out to be anything but a pacifist albeit a somewhat conflicted traitor. George Sanders is a journalist called Scott ffolliott (‘Is it pronounced with a stutter’? asks Jones after ffolliott has spelt out his surname). The ambiguity that Marshall and Sanders bring to their roles pleasingly reinforces the sustained who’s-fooling-who thread of the narrative. Edmund Gwenn, a startling combination of genial and brutal, is superb as the would-be homicidal bodyguard supplied for Jones by Fisher. Albert Bassermann makes a strong impression as the elderly Dutch diplomat Van Meer and Robert Benchley is very funny as Stebbins, a dolefully superannuated American journalist in London. Hitchcock appears as, appropriately enough, a man in the street reading a newspaper.
Robert Benchley also gets a credit for dialogue, along with James Hilton. The main screenwriters were Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison. In spite of the potent topicality of the story, the inspiration for the screenplay was a 1935 memoir, Personal History, by the journalist Vincent Sheean. Admirers of Foreign Correspondent included Josef Goebbels, who described it as ‘a masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries’.
22 July 2017
