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.

Nazi Agent

I mentioned the other day that I had multiple movies on my DVR that were coming up on TCM that I hadn't watched yet and would like to do posts on them. Two of them show up back-to-back tomorrow on TCM. The second, Desperate Journey at 9:15 AM, is one that last I checked is available on DVD, so I'm going to mention the other one that doesn't seem to be: Nazi Agent, at 7:45 AM. So that's the one I made a point of watching to do a post on.

Conrad Veidt plays Otto Becker, a seller of old books and stamps in New York City in the time just before the US wound up in World War II, helped out by assistant Miss Harper (Dorothy Tree). (The movie started production before December 7, 1941 but didn't finish until just after, and was released in January 1942.) Coming into the business one day is the new consul from Nazi Germany, Baron von Detner (also played by Conrad Veidt). The baron being a Nazi, of course he's pure evil, but more than that, he's also Otto's brother. Otto fled Nazi Germany, and now his own brother is here to tell him, no, you're going to work for the Nazis. Otto protests, but it turns out that he didn't quite have all his papers in order to enter the US, and the baron is going to use that to blackmail Otto. Not only that, but Miss Harper is a Nazi agent who will keep Otto in line.

Otto comes up with a reasonable enough plan, which involves enlisting the help of one of his customers who, he knows, shares Otto's dislike of the Nazis. But since we're fairly early in the movie, we know this is going to be a futile gesture and that the Nazis are more than one step ahead of Otto. Otto gives the customer a letter to take to the police, but the Nazis engineer a traffic "accident" before the man can get to the police.

The baron shows up to put some more pressure on Otto, this time bringing a gun to force Otto to do the baron's bidding. But there's a struggle between the two, and it's Otto who winds up shooting the baron. Since both characters are played by the same actor, Otto comes up with the sort of idea that only works in the movies: he's going to cut off his beard and slick his hair back, and pretend that he's the baron and that it was Otto who was killed. Never mind that there are all sorts of things Otto can't possibly know, such as the combination to the safe at the consulate, he's going to try to get away with it!

Amazingly, Otto is able to get away with it, with one key exception. That is Fritz (Frank Reicher), the family's old butler, who stayed with the family with Otto fled for America but has held anti-Nazi tendencies himself. So he's going to keep Otto's secret safe. Inside the consulate, there's all sorts of espionage going on, climaxing in an attempt to bomb a ship as it goes through the Panama Canal. Otto would like to stop it, but he has to deal with a devoted Nazi, Kurt Richten (Martin Kosleck), and a female agent who might not want to work with the Nazis, Kaaren De Relle (Ann Ayars).

Nazi Agent features a good acting job by Conrad Veidt, which is unsurprising. It also features a highly implausible plot, and an ending that I didn't think made much sense, and those definitely take the movie down a couple of notches. Then again, Nazi Agent wasn't conceived as a particularly big movie, but obviously second on the bill behind one of MGM's prestige movies that would have come out at the beginning of the year, and by the time the movie came out, audiences would have wanted movies showing good Americans defeating the evil Nazis, and Nazi Agent certainly does that.