Foreign Intrigue

Another of my recent DVD purchases was a cheap two-movie set (on one disc with no extras) of which one of the movies was Foreign Intrigue. It's a movie I hadn't heard of until somebody over on the TCM boards mentioned it, and after watching it, it's easy to see why I hadn't heard of it.

Victor Danemore lives in a big house on the French Riviera. He comes in from outside, goes into the library, one of those old rich person's home libraries with shelves so high you need a ladder to get the books from the top shelf. While up on the ladder, he sufferes a heart attack that's eventually going to be fatal.

Dave Bishop (Robert Mitchum) is Danemore's agent, and we first see him at the airport picking up tickets for Danemore and talking to another man. Bishop goes back to Danemore's house, to find the stricken boss who's still alive, but not for long. Danemore has a wife in another part of the house who didn't hear anything, and when Bishop tells Mrs. Danemore (Geneviève Page), she seems strangely distant, wondering more if her husband said any final words to Bishop. Press and other people with connections to Danemore come, and all of them ask Bishop the same question of whether Danemore had any last words for him. It's to the point where you expect the question to come and laugh when it does.

But this is no laughing matter. There's a lawyer in Vienna who had a document that he was keeping safe for Danemore. And it seems that Danemore was going to Vienna several times a year. So Bishop goes in order to find out what Danemore was doing in Vienna. That, and after Danemore's death it seems as though he shouldn't have had enough money to live the way he did. In Vienna, he finds that Dannemore when to a hole-in-the-wall with a blind landlady while the lawyer ultimately gets murdered, and where's that document?

From the few pieces of information Bishop was able to glean, it seems as though Stockholm should be the next stop, which is where he meets the Lindquists, mother and daughter Brita. Brita is played by Ingrid Thulin at the beginning of her international career; her surname is spelled Tulean in the credits with my guess being that the producer thought American audiences would be more likely to pronounce Tulean correctly than Thulin. Anyhow, Bishop wanted to see Brita's father, who as it turns out has been dead for a couple of years. Brita then learns the truth about her father, which is that he would have been a traitor in World War II if Sweden hadn't stayed relatively neutral. Danemore was blackmailing Lindquist.

Meanwhile, there's another man Spring (Frederic O'Brady) who knows something about Danemore, and has been following Bishop across Europe. Whether Spring is truly a bad guy or just opportunistic is something that Bishop isn't sure of, but as the movie goes on he seems increasingly dangerous to Bishop....

I said at the beginning that Foreign Intrigue languishes in relative obscurity, and I think there are multiple reasons for this. One is the more matter-of-fact reason of its production. It looks like another of those European productions that has an American star (in this case Mitchum) in the cast presumably to make it easier to get distribution in America. Surprisingly, despite the European filming and production values, the writer/producer/director Sheldon Reynolds was an American and the sources all call this an American movie.

As for the product we see on the screen, I found it to be a whole lot of gloss covering up the fact that there's not much going on beneath the surface. The characters remained blank slates to me for the most part, and key plot twists seem to come out of the blue. The movie is something that's nice to look at, but after watching it you may wonder if you really just watched a movie.

Still, for the low price of the DVD, you can't go wrong, so you may want to pick up the DVD and judge for yourself.