minefield
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison
(screenplay, with uncredited contributions by James Hilton, Robert Benchley,
and Ben Hecht), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Foreign Correspondent /
1940
The New York Times
reviewer Bosley Crowther, a man with whom I seldom agree about anything,
certainly got it right when in 1940 he described Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent as “over the
edge,” which today we might restate as “over the top.” Crowther summarizes it
nicely:
Never, we venture to suspect, has there
been an American news
scout abroad who got himself
so fantastically involved in international
monkey-shines as does Mr.
Hitchcock's bewitched and bewildered Joel
McCrea. And never, we know
for a fact, has Mr. Hitchcock let his flip
fancy roam with such wild
and reckless abandon as he does in the present
case. Instead of a young reporter covering
Europe methodically for his
sheet, Mr. Hitchcock is
giving us a picture of Europe—or, at least, a
small but extremely sinister
sub-sector of same—doing its most devious
best to cover and destroy Mr. McCrea.
At that previous luncheon Haverstock
(also accidentally) meets a beautiful young woman, Carol Fisher (Laraine Day)
who he believes is the publicist for the Peace organization, but is actually
the intelligent daughter of that organization’s founder, Stephen Fisher
(Herbert Marshall). Again by coincident—the element that connects all this
film’s incredible events—the car he overtakes in order to follow Van Meer’s
supposed murderer contains Carol Fisher and another young reporter—who soon
becomes a central figure in our story—Flolliott (George Sanders). The entire
chase—one of Hitchcock’s most wondrous displays of his cinematic mastery (for
much of the pre-car chase we observe the progress of the chaser and the chased
merely through the movement of unfurled umbrellas)—ends with the near
miraculous disappearance of the assassin’s car outside of a rustic Dutch
windmill.* While both the police and Haverstock’s new friends move on in
frustration, the rookie reporter stays, observing the windmill’s sails suddenly
moving in the opposite direction—a signal, we soon discover, for an approaching
plane to land in a nearby field (recalling the comings and goings of a plane in
North by Northwest)
Dauntlessly, our young adventurer enters the mill not only to discover the missing car wedged in a ground-level parking garage, but a gang discussing their mysterious plans. In a side room Haverstock spots a very much alive Van Meer, now, however, drugged and unable to reveal what he knows except through cryptic references to birds (obviously a hint at his soon-to-be flight).
What our young Quixote has uncovered, so
early in Hitchcock’s story, is the existence of an underground Nazi
organization who will soon intend to extract secret clauses from the
proclamation Van Meer was about to reveal at the conference. But by the time he
convinces the local policeman and his returned friends, Carol and Ffolliet, to
check out the mill, everyone has disappeared. Even the car has been whisked
away. As in so many Hitchcock works, all evidence—except for the fact that an
itinerant man found sleeping in the mill, inexplicably rubs his hands in the
soil—has been obliterated, and (like Roger O. Thornhill in North by Northwest and Manny Balestrero in The Wrong Man) Haverstock is completely discredited.
In fact, one might almost see Foreign Correspondent as a kind of early
playbook in which Hitchcock tries out cinematic maneuvers which he will employ
in later of his films. And, in that sense, we might almost see the 1940
film—his second American production—as a kind full-throttle exploration of
devices that might work to sustain his audiences’ interest.
Soon after, Haverstock’s life is
threatened by the sudden appearance of spurious Dutch policemen at his hotel
room; recognizing that his phone line has been cut, the reporter (like John
Robie in To Catch a Thief) suggests
that he should shower, escaping through a back window to play out another of
Hitchcock’s brilliant, if a bit unsubtle, shots: as Haverstock makes his way
around the ledge of his hotel, Hotel Europa, he accidently dislodges the “el”
of the hotel’s neon sign—signaling to all that Europe has suddenly become
“hot.” Whether the director means that politically (which he certainly might)
or sexually (since Haverstock is dressed only in a bathrobe and is about to
break into the bathroom of the woman he now loves, Carol), we are not certain.
He and Carol escape the villains (through
a gathering of hotel employees in his room that recalls the stateroom
convocation of staff in the Marx Brothers’ A
Night at the Opera) taking a ship back to England and her father. On board
the two declare their love for each other, proposing almost
Once in England, the story seems—at least
for a while—to turn in another direction, as Haverstock suddenly discovers one
of the Dutch windmill villains, Krug (Eduardo Ciannelli) at the Fisher’s
breakfast table. We now recognize that Carol’s father, the founder of the Peace
organization, is actually at the head of the Nazi organization. But Haverstock,
still presuming him to be innocent, reports his knowledge to Fisher, who, in
turn, hires a man (Edmund Gwenn), presumably to protect the reporter, but in
actuality, to kill him.
.png)
The long scene atop of Westminster
Cathedral, while the “protector” plots to push Haverstock to his death, calls
up several similar situations from Hitchcock’s films, including Suspicion and Vertigo. At the last moment, as he rushes forward to lunge at the
reporter, the murderer himself falls to his death—although the director wittily
suspends this information for a few more moments.
Despite this unfortunate turn of events,
however, Ffolliett is able to follow Fisher’s car to the backroom construction
site where the Nazi’s have taken Van Meer. Tortured by music, played day and
night, and bright lights shined 24 hours into his face, Van Meer seems almost
ready to reveal the hidden passages of the treaty to Fisher until,
unexpectedly, Ffolliett shows up, insisting that Fisher is no friend of Van
Meer’s. Haverstock and his fellow correspondent, the inept Stebbins (Robert
Benchley), show up moments later, only to find that Van Meer has been spirited
away—this time, however, to a safe clinic, where he will be protected and
detoxed (reminiscent of Alicia Huberman at the end of Notorious).
The film, now free of the Dutch
politician, flies free via a scene within a plane to the US, with Carol and her
father as well as Haverstock and
Ffolliett aboard (in a scene that the director uses again in Torn Curtain). Fisher’s interception of
a message meant for Ffolliett reveals that he will be taken into custody upon
his arrival, and, having now to face his betrayals, he admits his German
allegiance to his daughter, soon after which the two news reporters reveal themselves
as being aboard. Carol, still believing the worst of Haverstock, does not greet
him as a friend and now, even more so, because of his involvement with her
father’s exposure, is indignant; that is, until the plane begins to be strafed
by a German submarine, which eventually results in the plane’s crash. In the
final scenes of the very convincing depiction of terror as the plane goes down
over the ocean, we find Carol, her father, Haverstock, and Ffoliett, along with
a few others, clinging to a piece of the plane’s wreckage (a scene which has
some quick parallels to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat).
When the others are not looking, Fisher slips into the water and his certain
death.
Now aboard an American rescue ship, the
survivors are told that they cannot phone out any information concerning their
downing—except to express their safety to relatives. Calling his editor in New
York, and leaving the phone hidden off the hook, Haverstock relates his
experiences with Van Meer, Fisher, and their plane’s crash to the captain in
pretend protest, permitting his New York newspaper to get the greatest story of
the day!
.png)
The tacked-on last scene moves yet in
another direction, as Haverstock, accompanied by who he now presume is his
wife, begins his night report from London to his American audience. When the
sirens intervene and the lights go out, he delivers an all-out plea for
Americans to remember their English friends being bombed in their homes, an
effective propagandist piece that even German propagandist Joseph Goebells
recognized as a masterful conclusion to the film.
If Foreign
Correspondent, accordingly, is often unbelievable, nearly incoherent in its
multiple plot shifts, and a baggy monster in its quick shifts from comedy to
thriller, drama, adventure tale, and full-out propaganda, it is also a kind of
joy ride for any audience willing to take the voyage as this masterful director
tests out some of his best filmic tropes, a field he would mine for the rest of
his life.
*A humorous
scene during this chase involves a local man who attempts to cross the road,
upon each attempt encountering yet another vehicle until, in frustration, he
gives up and returns home, a situation repeated in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.
Los Angeles, July 5, 2014
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2014).
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment