Berlin Correspondent

Another of the movies that recently started showing up in the FXM lineup that I hadn't seen before is Berlin Correspondent. It's got another airing tomorrow morning at 4:40 AM, so I sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

A very young, and surprisingly mustachioed Dana Andrews plays Bill Roberts. He's an American radio correspondent in Berlin in November 1941. If you know your American history, this is about a week and a half before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, based on Bill's comments about Thanksgiving. Bill's Nazi minders make certain that Bill only gives out the propaganda that the Nazis want out there, but in fact Bill is able to get more out, by using coded language that would sound perfectly normal to an unsuspecting listener.

The Nazis quickly realize that somebody is getting secret information out to the west, and since Bill is a foreigner in Berlin, he's somebody that the Nazis are keeping their eye on anyway. They've got a private eye-type who's really working for the Gestapo tailing Bill, but he's one of thoes preternaturally stupid Nazis that populated Hollywood propaganda films during World War II. So Gestapo officer Capt. von Rau (Martin Kosleck) comes up with an idea. He'll have his girlfriend Karen Hauen (Virginia Gilmore) tail Bill and make his acquaintance. Bill will never suspect a woman who's never done intelligence work before.

Capt. von Rau is correct. Bill goes to a dealer in old stamps who just happens to be Karen's father (Erwin Kaiser). The stamps that Mr. Hauen sells to Bill have secret coded messages on the back written in invisible ink that only shows up under strong lights. Again, it's something that normal people wouldn't expect, but but Karen isn't stupid and figures things out. She doesn't realize at first that her father is in on the plot.

So the Nazis arrest Mr. Hauen and, to make getting rid of him easier, send him to an "insane asylum" run by Dr. Dietrich (Sig Ruman). Bill is somehow able to disguise himself as a Nazi psychiatrist working in Hitler's inner circle, which gets him into the facility, and able to free Mr. Hauen. However, Bill has to use his own passport to get Hauen out of the country to Switzerland, which poses serious problems.

Unsurprisingly, Capt. von Rau figures out right away what's happened, and has Bill rounded up and sent to an internment camp for foreigners, something that's easier considering that December 7 has come and the attack on Pearl Harbor has happened. By now Karen's decided that she doesn't want to marry von Rau after what he's done to her father and to nice Bill -- and one can guess that Karen's fallen in love with Bill. Capt. von Rau makes an agreement with Karen that he'll let Bill "escape" if she'll marry him (ie. von Rau). But it would take an idiot not to see that von Rau is lying through his teeth.

Berlin Correspondent is another of those movies with all sorts of plot holes, mostly revolving around the requirement that the Nazis we see have to be so stupid that it's a wonder how they were ever able to come to power, much less bambooze the west into giving up everything they did before Sept. 1939. But for all that obvious propaganda, Berlin Correspondent is actually an excellent example of the sort of B propaganda movie the Hollywood studios were churning out as part of the war effort to keep morale up on the home front. Andrews already shows promise, while Kosleck is good and Ruman provides the comic relief.

Berlin Correspondent is not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but as an example of the genre it inhabits, it's a very good example.