U-Boat 29

TCM ran a tribute to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger a few months back, and I've already done a post on one of the movies I recorded then since it showed up a few weeks back, The Red Shoes. Another of the movies is now on the TCM schedule again: The Spy in Black, airing tomorrow (January 23) at 9:00 AM. (Ben Mankiewicz said in his intro that when the movie was released in the US it was retitled U-Boat 29, and that's the title on the IMDb page, but the print TCM ran had the title The Spy in Black.)

The movie opens up in March 1917 in Kiel, which was the big port for the Imperial German naval fleet in the Great War. (The movie was released in August 1939, just before the start of World War II in Europe.) Hardt (Conrad Veidt) is a U-boat commander who has just returned to port. The propagranda press is saying England is in trouble, but Hardt knows otherwise, especially when the hotel restaurant can't serve him meat or much of any other food. On the way up to his room, Hardt is stopped by a junior sailor, who informs him that the Navy has more orders for him, and that he's going to have to go out to sea. The next day in the submarine, Hardt and his officers learn that their orders are to proceed to a point just off one of the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, where they'll put Hardt ashore on the isle of Hoy to meet and English contact, Miss Tiel, who is getting information on the British fleet movements in the area.

Cut to someplace in mainland Scotland. Anne Burnett (June Duprez) is a woman in her early 20s who's going to Hoy to be the new schoolmistress, at least until her fiancé, Rev. Harris, marries her. She's worried about missing the train, so when two women stop at the teahouse where Anne is, they offer to take her. It's a ruse, as the older lady chloroforms poor Anne and the younger woman is actually Miss Tiel (Valerie Hobson). They forge Anne's passport, that being necessary to enter a sensitive area like the Orkneys, and send her on her way, throwing poor Anne over a cliff.

Tiel gets to the island and, although nobody knows why she's really there, everybody wants to offer her the sort of hospitality that would prevent her from carrying out her mission. She says she's an independent woman who can take care of herself, and gets to her residence near the school just before Hardt gets off the boat. Hardt is able to evade the constabulary and get to Tiel. Joining them is a Lt. Ashington (Sebastian Shaw), a former ship's captain who was demoted for drunkenness, and is now willing to help Germany to get back at his commanders.

Their plot is going along fairly well, at least until an unexpected visitor shows up: Rev. Harris. This is a big problem since it's supposed to be Anne Burnett staying at the house. There is of course a woman there with a passport identifying her as Burnett, but Harris is the one person on the island who is going to know that this is not in fact Burnett. So the three people working for Germany have to start working much more quickly before everybody figures out that there's trouble afoot on the island. There are a lot of twists and turns before the resolution, although you can probably guess that since the movie was released in 1939, the British are going to win out in the end.

Despite the necessity of having the British triumph and that dictating some of the twists and turns, The Spy in Black is actually a pretty darn good movie. As with Powell and Pressburger's later 49th Parallel, it also portrays the Germans as intelligent and human, instead of the over-the-top evil that Hollywood films portrayed Germans as. Granted, these are not World War II Germans, but still, with it being obvious that there was a war coming, and soon, it was obvious that the Germans were going to be a big enemy in fairly short order.

The production values are also on a level with the movies Alfred Hitchcock had been making in the UK before leaving for Hollywood, which is to say not quite as high as what you'd get from a Hollywood studio film, especially the prestige productions. But the sort of material here means that a non-prestige level of production actually works in the movie's favor. The Spy in Black is a winner all around, and definitely a movie that should be better known.