Summary
John Jones is tasked with drumming up the news of what is going on in Europe during the lead up to WW2. As he probes for information he witnesses an assassination, falls in love with the daughter of a peace broker, and even avoids assassination himself. Whatever it takes to get the scoop.
Watching Twice
I’ll confess. I had to watch this film twice.
Hitchcock’s early films are usually a bit tough for me because he doesn’t seem to care as much about connecting you to or making you care much about his characters. John is a reporter who bucks at formal authority and is eager to get to the bottom of what is going on in Europe so that is enough for us to like him, right?
For me, I just need a bit more, especially when he misjudges his main love interest pretty dramatically right out of the gate.I just didn’t care about him and my mind wandered a bit. I realized later that I just hadn’t gotten what I was supposed to out of this film so I watched it again. This is far more consideration than most people would be willing to give this film so in general I wouldn’t recommend this film to the average movie watcher.
The Film
For those of you cinephiles or Hitchcokians out there, my second viewing of “Foreign Correspondent” was far more enjoyable and I think you will enjoy it as well. The main reason I think I found this to be a difficult film is that many elements of the film are very familiar. It makes it hard to watch when you know almost upon meeting a character, the exact way that they will play into the plot. Things that needed explaining to an audience in the past or maybe a bit of heavy handed foreshadowing are simply unnecessary in some situations to us today. It removes a lot of the tension in a film that is designed to be a thriller where the suspense ratchets up and up into the sky. Mistaken identities, double agents, and late night interrogations are only fascinating when they are unexpected surprises or contain vital hidden information.
One of the huge weaknesses of the film is that the information that the spies are after is never referred to as anything more specific than ‘something advantageous to the enemy should war break out.’ That takes the MacGuffin Theory too far in my opinion.
What we are left with will be interesting to cinephiles because of the craft involved but perhaps not so much to people whose primary goal in cinematic viewing is entertainment. Knowing the technical acumen needed for certain tracking of roaming camera shots such as in the windmill set piece may be impressive intellectually but they don’t make the scene any more tense to the modern audience.
That being said, the Windmill sequence, Assassination in the rain, and Airplane sequences are all top notch. The settings and design that went into the construction of these sequences is very interesting and informative for students of film and even if you decide not to watch the full thing, I’d recommend at least watching those sections.I know that this is a beloved film of Hitchcock’s but i can’t help feeling like it is somewhat slight.
Maybe that’s why, although I liked it OK, I can’t bring myself to give it a stellar rating. It’s well made and all but underneath it all is a very ambiguous plot about making things is a war go slightly better for the other side in an ambiguous way. Of course the war had not been fought yet so it’s hard to fault the film but it does make certain character resolutions seem a little off to a modern audience.
It may have seemed ok to have Carol (Laraine Day, “The Lockett“) tell John (Joel McCrea, “The Most Dangerous Game“) that her father fought for his country in his way and she has to do it in hers but knowing the history of WW2 as we do it is a hard pill to swallow that she’s saying that about her father, a Nazi.To me, it left the film feeling a bit naive and hard to connect with. I certainly see why, in its day, this film might have fascinated more people but today it just fell flat.
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