Hitchcock’s second American film is a chase across a Europe about to go dark, fast and funny and with three set pieces that people still copy. The middle idles and the last speech has dated. Worth your evening regardless.
Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film was Rebecca, a slow gothic in a large house. Foreign Correspondent, made the same year, is the other Hitchcock, the one who likes an ordinary man in over his head and a joke in the middle of a murder. Joel McCrea’s John Jones is a New York crime reporter posted to Europe in the summer of 1939 because his publisher is sick of experts. It is a good, quick, funny 120 minutes with three sequences that have never gone out of fashion, a middle that idles, and a closing speech that belongs to 1940 alone.
The sequences first. A man is shot on a flight of steps in Amsterdam, in pouring rain, and Rudolph Maté photographs it from above, so we see a field of black umbrellas and the killer’s escape is a ripple through them. We had seen the shot in stills a hundred times and it still made us sit up. The sound does it: one flat crack under the hiss of the rain, then the umbrellas moving the wrong way. Then a chase across flat country to a windmill whose sails turn against the wind, and inside it a wordless stretch of Jones on the stairs while Maté looks down through the wooden gears. The creak of the wheel does the work a score usually would, and Alfred Newman has the sense to stay out. Near the end comes a set piece aboard an aeroplane; what happens in it we will not say.
McCrea is not Cary Grant, which is why he was cast. He plays Jones as a man who is good at his job and ignorant of everything else, which is the joke and the point: he asks the plain questions the diplomats have stopped asking. George Sanders, as the British reporter Scott ffolliott, is dry and quick and takes every scene he is let into. Herbert Marshall gives Stephen Fisher, who runs a peace organisation, a soft, tired courtesy. Albert Bassermann plays Van Meer, the Dutch diplomat, with a gentleness that makes his later scenes hard to sit through. Robert Benchley, as the paper’s London man, nurses a hangover and has the best lines.
Edmund Gwenn turns up for ten minutes as Rowley, a cheerful Londoner hired to keep an eye on Jones. We laughed at him, at how chatty and pleased with himself he was, and a scene on top of a tower turned the laugh into something else, and we understood we had been set up. It is Hitchcock’s oldest trick. It still works.
The weaknesses are in the writing. Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison and Richard Maibaum share the screenplay credit, and the romance between Jones and Laraine Day’s Carol Fisher reads as if none of them wanted it. He proposes marriage on a day’s acquaintance and the film treats this as a development rather than a symptom. Day is given nothing to do but be charmed, then hurt. The London stretch marks time in hotel corridors while the plot waits for Holland to matter again, and Dorothy Spencer’s cutting, sharp in the chases, goes slack there. The villains, Eduardo Ciannelli’s Krug among them, are never named as anything more specific than the enemy, which reads now as an odd politeness.
The last two minutes are a speech into a microphone, aimed at America, and critics have winced at it since. We did, a little, and then we looked at the date. The film reached British cinemas on 11 October 1940, when London was being bombed nightly, and it was made to persuade a neutral country that Europe was worth the trouble. It is not subtle about this and, that year, had no reason to be.
This sits below The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, whose villains have faces. Anyone who knows North by Northwest will recognise the plan: a chase across a continent, danger in a flat open landscape where nothing should happen. That film is better. This one drew the map.
Watch it on a wet evening, for the umbrellas and the windmill; forgive it the proposal; and stay for the aeroplane.
