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Espionage and relationships comprise the braided line of thought (cf. Sternberg's Dishonored), springtime in 1918 with an eye on the gathering storms of 1937. U-boat periscopes at the beginning and end like iris-in and iris-out, the Stockholm dress store as the neutral axis of the welter of international pirouettes is a wry joke further refined by the coupling of Vivien Leigh and Conrad Veidt. She's a Swiss boutique owner whose fashions reveal secret coordinates once draped over lamps ("a very expensive luxury" in wartime), he's a baronial German deserter whose playboy cavorting cloaks a steely officer of the Kaiser. "One false move could mean death for both of us. But death is nothing to what I feel for you." Romance as the continuous encoding and decoding of objects and gestures, counterfeit data yielding to genuine emotion. Hitchcock is a model for much of Victor Saville's smoothness and speed and work with multiple planes of activity—the shop clerk enters the bustling music hall where secrets are sold and purchased, the camera hops from table to table while keeping background chorines in sharp focus. The heroine's beau (Anthony Bushell) is an indifferent chap, on the other hand Veidt's Teutonic agent has a dark romanticism, an ambiguous study noted by Powell in The Spy in Black. "Same thing in waltz time, sauerkraut!" Ships and characters alike switch flags and brandish weapons in times of volatile pretense, though the lingering image is of the lovers in a fragile embrace, the grand illusion of hope and union in the middle of a choppy, misty ocean. Edwards' The Tamarind Seed and Marquand's Eye of the Needle are strikingly complementary. With Joan Gardner, Ursula Jeans, Margery Pickard, and Eliot Makeham. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |