Inside the Lines

I'm always interested in seeing a new-to-me early talkie, even if the movie winds up being not very good. An example of this is Inside the Lines.

Betty Compson plays Jane Gershon, who at the start of the movie is seeing a man in Germany (Ralph Forbes) in the summer of 1914. He's German and she's English, so this time frame means the war is about to start and she's going to have to leave. She heads off to Paris.

It's clear that she's a spy of some sort, as she had a grille that revealed a hidden message in a letter, that message telling her where to go in Paris to see her spymaster. In a shocking turn of events, her spymaster is German! Jane is going to be working for the Germans, going to Gibraltar which is of course a British possession. There, she's going to pass herself off as the niece of Lady Crandall, which will allow her to get at the Governor's (Montagu Love) safe which holds important state secrets.

Jane arrives at Gibraltar just in time to see another spy get caught out and taken away to be executed, but the authorities don't realize that she's a spy. This allows her to get to Crandall's spacious house. Crandall suspects something since her niece looked rather different the last time the two were together several years ago, but the Germans were quite clever at making certain Jane knew everything about this niece so she could fool Crandall.

And then another house guest comes: British military intelligence attaché Eric Woodhouse. And wouldn't you know it, this is the man that Jane had been seeing in Germany! He obviously knows that this "niece" is no niece of Crandall's at all. Yet rather than calling her out at the first instance, he does nothing at all, mostly because he's in love with her, the idiot. Also, the question of what he was doing in Germany isn't answered.

Anyhow, there's a kabuki theater between Jane and Eric until the final reveal... which I'm not going to give away, but makes no sense. And that's the big problem I had with the movie. The writers came up with an intriguing premise, but one they had no idea how to extricate themselves from, so they brought in a deus ex machina.

Still, the movie is only a little over an hour, and it's available on a cheap Alpha Video DVD, so if you want to watch it, you won't have lost much money or time.