SEVEN DAYS TO NOON. British Lion Films, 1950. Barry Jones, Olive Sloane, André Morell, Sheila Manahan, Hugh Cross, Joan Hickson, Geoffrey Keen, Victor Maddern. Screenplay: Roy Boulting and Frank Harvey. Original Screen Story by Paul Dehn and James Bernard. Directors: John and Roy Boulting.

   This taut little suspense film is one of the best of its kind ever made. With an Oscar-winning original story by Paul Dehn and James Bernard (best known for composing many of the scores for the Hammer horror films) and a screenplay by co-director Roy Boulting and novelist Frank Harvey (White Mercenaries), the film is an achingly suspenseful exercise in nuclear extortion as a soft-spoken scientist holds London hostage amidst a nationwide manhunt, done in a variation of the docu-noir style of many American films of the period.

   The film also won the British Oscar, the BAFTA, for best picture and John and Roy Boulting received best directing nominations from the Venice Film Festival.

   Barry Jones (Brigadoon, Demetrius and the Gladiator, War and Peace) is the scientist, Professor Willington, who disappears from his job at a nuclear research facility and leaves a letter to the Prime Minister (Ronald Adam) stating he will destroy London in seven days at noon on the seventh day unless his demands for nuclear disarmament are met.

   The world was made in seven days, and London will be destroyed in seven days unless mankind stops the madness of nuclear research is the disturbed professor’s demand.

   Superintendent Folland (Morell) of the Yard and Stephen Lane (Hugh Cross), the professor’s research assistant and future son-in-law, head the nationwide manhunt once it is discovered that along with the professor a suitcase nuclear device is missing. (They didn’t exist then and still don’t now, but where would these films be without them?)

   The film focuses less on the hunt itself than on Willington as he flees to London and interacts with a handful of people including a somewhat flowsy Cockney woman (Olive Sloane) and his landlady (Joan Hickson — Miss Marple). The professor’s ideals are contrasted with the ordinary real people they threaten in a small Cockney neighborhood — not saints or even the salt of the earth, but human beings unaware their very existence is threatened.

   As the pressure intensifies and the noon deadline approaches, London is evacuated and the shots of the empty streets are both haunting and striking. Meanwhile the authorities close in and the professor’s mental state deteriorates more rapidly. The final confrontation in a church is both evocative and tense.

   Solid as this is as a suspense film, there is more to it, which perhaps explains why it has a resonance still today. Jones is neither an egotist nor a monster, but a kindly and gentle man driven to the ultimate act of terror by the daily horror of the work he pursues. Morell is presented as a human and understanding policeman, and everyone involved seems weighted down by the horror of both the potential destruction and the morality involved.

   Willington is a madman and a terrorist, but a real effort is made to understand his mental breakdown and stop him without killing him; something it becomes increasingly obvious they may not be able to accomplish.

   Seven Days to Noon is something more than a suspense film, an early example of the anti-nuclear movement, then in its infancy, and also a meditation on the beginnings of the arms race that would reach its high (or low) point with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film bothers to ask important questions, and to force viewers to ask who the real madman is — the professor unbalanced by the horror of his work, or the society blithely ignoring the apocalypse under its nose.

   There are no easy answers here. Horrible as the Professor’s threat is it may be less horrible than the future he wants to prevent. The film never suggests such terrorism is justified, only that to an unhinged mind it may seem so.

   This story has been done countless times since, but seldom this well. There is an interesting contrast with a 1953 American film from Fred Sears and Ivan Tors, The 49th Man, an altogether pulpier (but entertaining) version of the A-bomb in the city story with a few nice paranoid twists and a good performance by John Ireland as an undercover operative.

   But this film is neither shrill nor melodramatic; it is quiet and powerful, and it may be more relevant today than it was when it was made sixty years ago. It also offers a fascinating look at a London still marked by the bomb craters from WW II, at a time when you could actually conceive an orderly evacuation of a city the size of London.

Note: If you go to IMDb you will discover this is the first original film score by noted British film composer John Addison.

ACROSS THE PACIFIC. Warner Brothers, 1942. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, Victor Sen Yung, Keye Luke, Charles Halton, Richard Loo, Monte Blue. Screenplay by Richard Macauley, based on a Saturday Evening Post serial “Aloha Means Goodbye” by Robert Carson. Directed by John Huston .

   It was inevitable that any follow up to The Maltese Falcon was going to be anti-climactic, which is a shame, because this lighthearted flag-waver has a myriad of charms all its own including the sexual byplay between Bogart and Mary Astor, and Sidney Greenstreet’s treacherous Dr. Lorenz.

   And it probably didn’t help that midway through production the Second World War broke out with the very much for real attack on Pearl Harbor, and the plot about a fictional Japanese attack at the same location was suddenly too serious for this lighthearted treatment.

   The production took a hiatus while the script was quickly rewritten, and somehow in the transition the title remained unchanged, even though now the ship in question never even reaches the Pacific. (It might also explain some less competent model work than usually seen from the studio effects department.)

   Bogart is Rick Leland, a US Army officer cashiered for irregularities with company funds. He heads for Canada hoping to enlist, but they want no part of him, so he determines to sell his services to the Chinese and sets sail on a Japanese ship sailing for Panama and then Yokohama.

   On board the ship are Dr. Lorenz (who teaches economics in Manila), his servant, and Alberta Marlowe (Mary Astor)

who claims to be a simple girl from Medicine Hat out to see the world despite a wardrobe to die for and the sophistication of a woman of the world.

   And as you quickly learn, nothing is exactly what it seems. Lorenz managed to get Leland on the ship because he knows of his military background, and Leland is in reality a secret agent, his disgrace a cover designed to lure Lorenz and the Japanese into approaching him.

   After a stop over in New York where Victor Sen Yung comes on board as a jive-talking Japanese American sailing East to take over family business interest, Leland and Astor stop a Filipino from assassinating Lorenz.

the good doctor makes it clear he wants information from Leland about Panama’s defenses and is willing to pay for it while Leland romances Miss Marlowe

and ingratiates himself with Lorenz.

   Once in Panama, things move fast. Astor disappears, and Greenstreet outwits Leland and gets the plans for the Canal’s air defenses. Leland meets a Chinese at a Japanese theater in Panama where a well staged shootout ensues, and then heads for a plantation that has been mentioned as a place of interest.

   There he finds Astor, the daughter of the westerner (Monte Blue) forced to front for the Japanese, and discovers a hidden airfield built in the jungle. It’s December 6th, 1941, and using the information gotten from Leland, the Japanese are going to bomb the Canal to coincide with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

   Of course they are no match for our hero, who dispatches Victor Sen Yung with a right cross and grabs Richard Loo’s .50 caliber machine gun to shoot down the bomber and take care of the rest.

   Back at the plantation Sidney Greenstreet contemplates hari-kiri, but lacks the nerve and Leland arrests him.

   And as they step outside a formation of American planes flies over:

   No one is arguing that this is the same category as The Maltese Falcon, but it is a remarkably assured and entertaining spy film with dialogue that sparkles and real sexual tension between Bogart and Astor.

   This often gets lost among the bigger (and better) films of Bogart and Huston, but deserves to be seen and enjoyed. It’s fast, flip, sexy, and well acted by all concerned.

   Maybe we should just be grateful that there are so many great films that this terrific good film gets lost in the shuffle. This tongue-in-cheek thriller is still fresh and smart, and more modern than most similar films of the era.

Note: Huston left to join the war effort and the final scene was shot by Vincent Sherman. And for some reason the two maps showing the Canal in the film are wrong. The one at the end of the film upside down with the Pacific on Panama’s East Coast! I suppose it’s possible the intent was to keep the enemy from using the maps, but you have to imagine the Japanese knew where the Canal was. You wouldn’t think it would be that easy to disguise.

SPLIT SECOND. RKO Radio Pictures, 1953. Stephen McNally, Alexis Smith, Jan Sterling, Keith Andes, Arthur Hunnicutt, Paul Kelly, RIchard Egan, Robert Paige, Frank DeKova. Screenplay: William Bowers & Irving Wallace, based on a story by Chester Erskine & Irving Wallace. Director: Dick Powell.

   This terrific little minor “A” film with top “B” values features a number of popular themes from the early fifties, including the brutal superman with fascist tendencies and philosophy, the small group of diverse people under incredible tension, and the terrifying threat of atomic annihilation that seemed to hang over us all.

   The latter is especially potent for those of us young enough to remember “Duck and Cover” exercises in grade school. It was always hard to adjust back to Dick and Jane after contemplating that nuclear blast.

   So when ever this one shows up on television drag out the VCR or DVR and get your finger ready on the record button. It’s a tautly directed effort from actor Dick Powell (his first), whose career as a director varies from wartime drama like The Enemy Below and The Hunters to the musical remake of It Happened One Night as You Can’t Run Away From It and the infamous The Conqueror (with John Wayne as Genghis Khan — “I will have this Tartar woman.”).

   Story and screenplay are co-written by bestselling novelist Irving Wallace (The Chapman Report, The Prize, The Three Sirens …)

   Stephen McNally is Sam Hurley, an escaped convict and one of the nastiest pieces of business since Bogart’s Duke Mantee set the standard for this sort of thing way back in The Petrified Forest. McNally is a brutal monster, not smart, but clever and ruthless. It’s his idea to hide out in New Hope City, Nevada, an abandoned mining town, a place literally no one will look because it is destined to be the site of a nuclear test the next morning.

   Trapped with him is the usual assortment of the good, the weak, and the simply human: Andes, Alexis Smith, Jan Sterling, doctor Richard Egan, prospector Arthur Hunnicutt. Stir well, and let simmer in an isolated place while the police close in and the clock ticks down and you have just about a perfect recipe for this kind of film.

   Combining with the first class performance by McNally as the convict is Alexis Smith as a sexy high class dame who represents everything he resents and can never have or be, and watch as the people involved either find unexpected strength or crumble under the pressure as the bomb literally ticks down, and the deadline to get out grows narrower and narrower. Paul Kelly is good as McNally’s only tenuous tie to decent human feelings.

   This one ratchets up the tension with real skill. It can be as uncomfortable as the desert sand under the skin and as raw as the endless hot wind on the nerves. At times it becomes almost unbearable.

   Okay, admittedly the security around the nuclear test site is a little lax, and you have to wonder what kind of a hold even the brutal McNally could have over his men that they would go along with this insanity, but give the film its few minor logic problems (Egan’s doctor pretty much just drives into town without even pretending to sneak), and this film builds to a great deal of very real tension.

   For some reason Split Second has always reminded me of another taut little suspenser set in the desert, Inferno, though there is really little similarity between the films. Maybe it’s because both films build to a point where your participation in the suspense is almost visceral.

   McNally was one of the few actors who seemed as at home as the hero as the villain, which may be why his bad guy roles have a resonance that many actors don’t or can’t bring. We always knew he could play as stalwart and straight as he did brutal and sociopathic, which gave his charming monsters an added dimension missing in some other actors (in this he always reminded me of Robert Ryan, star of the above mentioned Inferno).

   Alexis Smith made a career of playing smart sexy women who had brains as well as nerves, and Jan Sterling was one of the great ‘dame’ players always giving her roles an added edge of humanity, that culminated in an Oscar nomination for her aging bad girl with one last chance in The High and the Mighty (ironically another film about a small group of people under pressure). It’s no accident that she and Smith both get top billing over the films ‘hero’ Keith Andes.

   I won’t give away the ending, save to point out it’s fairly clever and just within the bounds of possibility if not probability. See this one and enjoy it. It’s a little film that will stick to your ribs a lot longer than some of the bigger more celebrated films of that era.

   But don’t watch it if you are already tense or if your blood pressure is high. This one could put it through the roof.

TWO TICKETS TO LONDON. Universal Pictures, 1943. Michèle Morgan, Alan Curtis, C. Aubrey Smith, Barry Fitzgerald, Dooley Wilson, Sherlee Collier (the latter uncredited). Screenplay by Tom Reed, based on a story by Roy William Neill. Director: Edwin L. Marin.

   It’s a good thing that Roy William Neill was a better producer and director (the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series, for example, and Black Angel) than he was at writing stories, if this film is an example, as there’s very little positive I can say about the story of Two Tickets to London, or in other words, next to nothing.

   The opening scenes are a little murky, deliberately so and not badly done, as we’re plunged right into the second act without so much as a hint of what happened in the first one.

   But details are gradually filled in: Dan Driscoll (Alan Curtis) is the First Mate of a ship that was sunk by a Nazi submarine; as one of the survivors, though, he’s in handcuffs and being taken by train back to London where he’ll go on trial for treason.

   The train is bombed, however, and he makes good his escape, accompanied by a good-looking pub singer named Jeanne (Michèle Morgan), who’s frightened of him at first but gradually begins to believe in his innocence.

   And together they head to London where he hopes to obtain proof that he’s not the guilty party. You want more? Sorry. That’s it.

   I was hoping there would be more, but there’s not, and the pair’s adventures getting to London are about as interesting as watching paint dry, as the old saying goes.

   Or they would be, except for seven year old Sherlee Collier’s performance as a wonderfully precocious and charmingly polite schoolgirl who serves them tea along the way, and for the two primary actors themselves, who make something, if not a lot, out of very little.

   Michèle Morgan didn’t make many American films; luckily for her career she returned to her native France and became hugely famous there – and I think she still is.

   Alan Curtis, well, he wasn’t so lucky. He was in High Sierra before this one (1941) and starred in Phantom Lady afterward (1944, and reviewed here ), but otherwise all I see in his list of credits is a string of medium-good B-movies as well as many perhaps not so good. He died young in 1953 at the age of only 44.

THE TOUGHEST MAN ALIVE. Allied Artists, 1955. Dane Clark, Lita Milan, Anthony Caruso, Ross Elliott. Screenplay: Steve Fisher. Director: Sidney Salkow.

   When it comes down to it, all things considered, they couldn’t have made a better choice to play the title character than Dane Clark. Short, wiry, but not overly pugnacious, he still carried himself in all of the films he made as if he had a chip on his shoulder, one that he all but asked anyone who crossed his path to knock off.

   To nab a gang of crooks who’ve been stealing US government munitions and selling them to the highest bidder on the open market, Dane Clark as agent Lee Stevens goes underground, posing as the notorious soldier-of-fortune (and all around bad guy) Pete Gore (Anthony Caruso) to make contact with the gang.

   And where is Pete Gore? Locked up in some Latin American prison, and of course we all know what’s going to happen down there. Stevens’ means of tracking down the high honcho of gang is Lida Velasco (the statuesque Lita Milan, who later married Ramfis Trujillo, the son of the well-known Dominican Republic dictator). Lida herself is the daughter of a recently deposed banana republic dictator, and she needs guns to overthrow the current regime.

   That about sums it up, except for agent Cal York (Ross Elliott), Stevens’ primary contact with his own office. Once it’s known that his buddy is happily married, we know how that particular sidebar of the story is going to work out. Actually we pretty much how the entire story is going to end up, once it’s properly underway.

   No surprises here, nor anywhere along the way.

THE KREMLIN LETTER. 1970. Patrick O’Neal, Richard Boone, Barbara Parkins, Bibi Anderson, George Sanders, Nigel Green, Orson Welles, Max Von Sydow, Micheál MacLiammóir, Raf Vallone, Dean Jagger, Marc Lawrence, Nial McGinnis, Lila Kedrova, John Huston, Vonda McGee. Screenplay: John Huston & Gladys Hill. Based on the novel by Noel Behn. Directed by John Huston.

   Charles Rone (Patrick O’Neal) of the Office of Naval Intelligence, a genius with a photographic memory and a possible death wish, is seconded to a legendary intelligence operation with roots in the Second World War to recover the Kremlin Letter, a letter from a high ranking American intelligence officer promising the United States would back the Soviet Union in trouble with Red China, passed to a Soviet politician in secret talks with the West. Neither side can afford for the letter to come to light.

   The team is lead by the legendary Highwayman (Jagger); Ward, the smooth, cruel, and avuncular Boone; Lord Ashley’s Whore (Nigel Green); the cross dressing Warlock (Sanders); and Barbara Parkins as the daughter of an aging cracksman who has withdrawn from the team.

   After a nasty bit of sexual extortion against a Russian agent in the US involving his wife and daughters and lesbian seduction, the team is off to Moscow, where the complex game of cross and double cross involves them with Soviet counter spy Colonel Koskov (Von Sydow) of the Third Department who is being spied upon by his own boss Bresnivich (Orson Welles). Koskov’s marriage to the wife (Bibi Anderson) of a former agent who had been bribed to retrieve the Kremlin letter also threatens his future.

   While the atmosphere of cross and double cross and the day-to-day details of espionage tradecraft are emphasized as in Behn’s best-selling novel, and the complex plot is kept as straightforward as possible, the film is curiously distant, and O’Neal’s Rone difficult to warm to.

   The suspense never really kicks in, and the real purpose of the deadly games being played comes as only a minor surprise to anyone who has been paying attention or is at all familiar with spy films and novels in general, despite the fact Huston had been involved with spy movies as far back as his second directorial effort, the under-appreciated Across the Pacific with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet..

   For that matter the film is handsomely shot by cinematographer Ted Scaife, and Huston’s direction is as usual stylish and certain, if as distant as his leads.

   Richard Boone is particularly good, though if you don’t figure out who he is within seconds of him coming on screen you aren’t paying attention. George Sanders has some fun playing the homosexual Warlock who is a cross dresser and likes to knit and uncovers Koskov’s former homosexual liaisons from the past; and Orson Welles has a few showy scenes as the Russian master spy as wary of Koskov as the west, who has secrets of his own. Nigel Green also has some good scenes as an amoral pimp and drug dealer who is a key figure in the spy ring.

   Behn wrote only two other novels, Shadowboxer, about a troubled agent who rescues prisoners from the Nazi death camps and finds himself caught in a double dealing plot involving the future of post war Germany, and Seven Silent Men, a caper novel.

   His non-fiction book The Big Stick Up at Brinks was the basis for the William Friedkin film The Brinks Job, and he wrote the teleplay for several episodes of Homicide. His book Lindbergh: The Crime offered the controversial theory that there was no kidnapping and the crime was staged to cover up the Lindbergh baby’s accidental death.

   In addition he was an important figure in the development of Off Broadway theater. He is one of the few American writers of his era to rival the British at the serious spy novel.

   The Kremlin Letter probably works better on television than it did on the big screen. O’Neal is a good actor, but he is too dispassionate here, and we are never allowed inside, a fact overcome in the novel by Behn recounting in detail the events in Rone’s past that formed his character and made him ideal for this deadly game. The scenes he has with Bibi Anderson are one of the few times in the film he shows any signs of emotion at all. For most of the film he only manages to look as if he is smelling something vaguely distasteful.

   Even when everything begins to fall apart in Moscow, the film maintains a leisurely pace that neither raises O’Neal’s pulse rate or our own. It’s as if everyone is too cold to work up a sweat even about the possibility of torture and death.

   The Kremlin Letter is dark and grim, and deals with the dark side of espionage, where human emotions and desires are merely pawns for the greater games being played. Neither O’Neal or Parkins, as the only two humans in this inhuman game, involve us enough to become really concerned with their plight, however, or the moral conundrums they are caught up in.

   Even at the end when the real plot is uncovered and O’Neal is sent home with one last murderous job to clean up the lose ends of the nasty affair, it seems less a painful torment than a mildly troublesome detail. By this point it’s too late to suddenly inject human emotions in these puppets. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Supermarionation creations showed more human reactions than O’Neal does here, despite some rather flashy and trite business by director Huston to bring home the impact of Boone’s last macabre act of sadism.

   Huston did a good deal better with his film of Desmond Bagley’s The Freedom Trap, The MacKintosh Man, a spy thriller suggested by the George Blake case, where a charismatic Paul Newman in the lead kept the film and the viewer centered.

   The Kremlin Letter is a faithful rendition of a good book, and I like the film much better than what I’ve indicated, but it’s a curiously distant and uninvolved film as unemotional and amoral as its characters.

   It may be accurate about the world of spies and counterspies and the Byzantine games played by flawed human beings in that world, but it’s as cold as a snow drift on the streets of Moscow, and a handful of colorful secondary characters and Boone’s showpiece avuncular monster, aren’t enough to make up for the fact the film has no emotional core for the viewer to identify with.

A DANDY IN ASPIC. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1968. Laurence Harvey, Tom Courtenay, Mia Farrow, Harry Andrews, Peter Cook, Lionel Stander, Per Oscarsson. Original music: Quincy Jones. Screenwriter: Derek Marlowe, based on his novel of the same name. Directors: Anthony Mann, Laurence Harvey (the latter uncredited).

   A troubled production usually means a troubled if not bad movie, and A Dandy in Aspic is not much of an exception, if it’s one at all. Its director, Anthony Mann, died during the filming of this movie, and Laurence Harvey, to save the film, took over. (I’ve not been able to learn exactly what percentage Harvey did, but presumably it was all of the location shooting — in and around Berlin, Germany — and of course putting the film together at the end.)

   Anthony Mann’s death also put the film way over schedule, which kept Mia Farrow overseas away from her then husband, Frank Sinatra, which strained their marriage to its final breaking point, or so I’m told. (That he was 30 years old than she was may have also had something to do with it.)

   None of which does a viewer have to know to decide on his or her own that a movie just isn’t cutting it. It’s the tale of a Russian spy (a dashing but dour fellow named Eberlin, aka Laurence Harvey) who’s dug himself into the British spy service so well that no one knows that he’s also been busily assassinating some of their best operatives. They have his name, Krasnevin, but no more than that, and the task that Eberlin is asked to do is to eliminate him — or that is to say, himself.

   It is difficult at first to understand all of this, and thank goodness for movies on tape or DVD where you can back up every once in a while. But this is one of those spy films in which the plot is deliberately kept murky so as to make a point about the dirty nature of the spy business, but which also helps make sure that the viewers are puzzled as well. (Avoiding this small difficulty is the narrow path that spy books and espionage movies must travel, without a lot of leeway. Only the best seem to do it well.)

   My problem is that Russian names all sound alike to me — a deficiency on my part and no one’s fault but my own — and worse, many of the other mostly dour actors look very much alike. (Harvey is the only one who’s also dashing, but some of the chaps on the British side are rather overweight and somewhat humorous in that regard — but they’re suits only and otherwise pretty much indistinguishable.)

   Getting back to Eberlin, he’s indeed dashing enough to attract the attention of a free lance photographer named Caroline, delightfully played by an innocently wide-eyed Mia Farrow.

   In fact, Miss Farrow is the only source of light and utter joyousness in the entire movie. The rest is a deep study in emotions and deceptions — Eberlin’s only real wish is to return to his native Russia, but naturally he’s too useful to the Russians where he is — and of course the seriousness of the trap he finds himself in.

   A musical score by the likes of a Quincy Jones is usually a plus for most movies, but in this case, it is not so. A good rule of thumb to go by is that if you notice the music, the movie is not completely capturing your attention, and so it is here. While the score is modern enough, for the late 60s, it’s also gimmicky and predictable.

   For me at least, to sum things up, while this movie had its moments, enough so that to suggest watching it may be a worthy way to spend an evening, given the judicious use of the rewind button. And yet. There is also the ending, which I see I haven’t mentioned so far, one that comes as both a surprise and inevitable, as is true in most serious spy and espionage movies, but in this case, it is one, sad to say, that you will remember no more than five minutes after you have turned off the TV.

GRAHAM GREENE – The Confidential Agent. William Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1939. Viking Press, US, hc, 1939. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft, including Bantam #971, pb, 1952.

   Graham Greene wrote The Confidential Agent pretty much off the top of his head in 1938 as the Spanish Civil War slouched toward its depressing end, which may be why this tale of a hunted man on a secret mission for a government that doesn’t trust him never names names.

   The country — in the midst of civil war and desperate to buy supplies before the rebels get them — is only referred to obliquely and the major players are simply given initials with no hint of national flavor. But there weren’t that many countries struggling through civil war just then, and readers of the time probably saw right through it.

   All of the action is set the in the giddy atmosphere of pre-war England anyway, and Greene evokes the feel of a nation teetering at the brink of war (as he did in This Gun for Hire) with a fine mix of dread and excitement, like a child standing in line for a roller coaster that will tragically malfunction.

   The story, with D, a professor-turned-agent hounded through the countryside by a rival agent, betrayed by his contacts in England, and befriended by a spoiled heiress and a romantic teenager offers very little of what one thinks of as action, but moves quickly along nonetheless, helped considerably by Greene’s obvious affection for his shabby cast and their personal quirks.

   Plot twists rise from the characters themselves, rather than from the dictates of plot, and the resolution, as usual with Greene, comes about when some of these characters manage to rise above their petty concerns and look about them.

   Thus, the tension arises not so much between one side versus another (though there’s plenty of that) but between the universal conflict of self-interest and altruism. It’s an interesting approach for a thriller, and Greene brings it off with the skill that made him a major player in the genre.

CONFIDENTIAL AGENT. Warner Brothers, 1945. Charles Boyer, Lauren Bacall, Victor Francen, Wanda Hendrix, George Coulouris, Peter Lorre, Katina Paxinou. Screenwriter-producer: Robert Buckner. Director: Herman Shumlin.

   Confidential Agent was filmed by the Warners in 1945, by which time all the wraps were off: Spain is clearly designated as the source of intrigue, and French Charles Boyer, German Peter Lorre, Belgian Victor Franken and Greek Katina Paxinou all play Spaniards; at least they’re more convincing than Lauren Bacall as a British socialite.

   That’s right, Brooklyn-born Bacall (aka Bette Perske) plays the daughter of an English “honorable” and nothing in the screenplay makes any attempt at explaining her flat American accent.

   Normally, faced with incongruity of this magnitude, the writers throw in something about being raised by an aunt in Canada or something, but not here. Nope, that’s just the way she talks and let’s get on with the show.

   And despite the Hollywood absurdities, the show ain’t bad at all.

   Director Herman Shumlin was primarily a stage director (with only one other film, the very stagy Watch on the Rhine to his credit) and not terribly sharp at conveying action or keeping up the pace, but he’s very good with the actors.

   Lorre and Paxinou make a terrific pair of nasties in the Lorre/ Greensteet tradition, playing off each other quite nicely, and though Bacall, in her second film, seems a bit cautious away from Howard Hawks and husband Bogart, she manages some real chemistry up against a very steely Boyer.

   Shumlin is also wise enough to get out of the way and let veteran photographer James Wong Howe fill the screen with images of poetic loneliness, evoking Greene’s themes of isolation, backed up by the lush music of Franz Waxman, one of the defining composers of the ’40s.

   Writer/producer Robert Buckner, a studio stand-by with Dodge City and From Hell to Texas to his credit, tightens Greene’s tale neatly, eliminating bits of the book that really go nowhere, while keeping true to the letter and spirit of the thing.

   He also adds a couple neat twists of his own, including a come-uppance for nasty Katina Paxinou that I won’t spoil for you, and a wonderful bit where Boyer prepares to kill Lorre for selling him out:

   Lorre grovels as only he can, trying to justify his treachery on the grounds of ill health, pleading, “I have a bad heart! The doctor said I had six months to live!” to which Boyer quietly replies, “He was wrong.”

   Gotta love it.

SEE NO EVIL. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1971. British title: Blind Terror. Mia Farrow, Dorothy Alison, Robin Bailey, Diane Grayson, Brian Rawlinson, Norman Eshley, Paul Nicholas. Screenplay: Brian Clemens. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   Mia Farrow had already made Rosemary’s Baby (three years before) when she appeared in this movie, and even if she was 26 at the time, she could easily have passed for 16. Young, boyishly slim, ethereally beautiful, she might still have possessed a limited range as an actress, but no one could have doubted she was a movie star.

   And she’s the center of focus throughout this movie, recently blinded and forced to move in with her uncle, aunt and female cousin in their isolated English country mansion, she turns in a near tour de force of terror when a crazed killer leaves her unknowingly in a house full of blood and dead bodies.

   The emphasis is not on the killing, thankfully, but on her character’s reaction – I’ll take that back. It is the audience that is kept on the edge of their seats waiting for her to discover what they all know full well. Waiting and waiting, and then!

   Adjusting to becoming blind has to be one of the toughest tasks someone has to take on, and to be forced to undergo what Sarah does in her several mad dashes for escape, it is almost too much too bear. The killer is seen only from the waist down, in a series of low level shots not dissimilar to many seen in the definitive British TV spy series The Avengers, with which screenwriter Brian Clemens was long affiliated.

   Only the ending of See No Evil lets the viewer down, or at least this one, as Sarah is unaccountably left alone one last time, resulting in a fairly hair-raising one last encounter with the killer. All warning shouts to her boy friend, who’s just rescued her, go unheard. What a dummy!

[UPDATE] 10-19-09. Another movie with a similar theme is, of course, Wait Until Dark, 1967, with Audrey Hepburn as a young blind woman trapped in an apartment with a gang of hoodlums. I’ve been hoping someone else would mention it, as I haven’t seen it since it first came out, and I don’t remember any of the details — other than being scared to death for the heroine, who couldn’t see any of the dangers around her — but the audience could!

ELYESA BAZNA, with Hans Nogly – I Was Cicero. Harper & Row, hardcover, 1962. Paperback reprint: Dell, 1964.

   In I Was Cicero Elyesa Bazna relates how he angled himself a job as valet to the British Ambassador in Turkey so he could spy for Germany in 1943 under the code name “Cicero” — employment that became famous in 1950 when L. C. Moyzisch, his German contact man, wrote Operation Cicero, and even more famous in ’52 when Joseph L. Mankiewicz filmed it as 5 Fingers.

   But it was “Cicero” who became famous, not Bazna. So I guess Bazna, toiling in obscure poverty in Turkey, looked around at everyone getting rich off his story and decided to cash in on it if he could. I Was Cicero (co-written with Hans Nogly) never found the popularity of 5 Fingers, but it’s a generally engrossing and often insightful look inside the mind of a spy.

   Bazna cherishes no illusions about himself; he admits from the start that he was a lower-class working man of minimal education, with no polish, little imagination and unprepossessing appearance, who had the ambition to take a chance when he had it, and the smarts to get out when the going got dangerous. He was also cheated outrageously by his Nazi paymasters, for whom he insists he worked in good faith.

   So where Moyzich’s Operation Cicero is mostly about Moyzisch and his growing realization that his superiors in Berlin were mad — and the moral dilemma of trying to serve his country in such times — Bazna’s I Was Cicero is just about a guy doing a job that happens to be incredibly dangerous.

   And though Bazna was stealing secrets instead of robbing banks, he admits, like Alvin Karpis, to getting hooked on the excitement of it, and the sheer visceral pleasure of having money. Like Karpis, he makes no excuses for his work; he just takes pride in a job well done.

   Afterword: When Joseph Mankiewicz filmed 5 Fingers (1952) he pretty much cut out Moyzisch’s part, added some incidental characters and a sub-plot to move things along, plus a suspense-evoking score by Bernard Herrmann to lend the whole thing a creepy mood.

   His biggest change, though, was to turn the character of working-class schlub Elyesa Bazna into the suave, classy James Mason, who played the part to sinister perfection.

   Basically, Mankiewicz turned the story inside out, and no one complains because he made a good movie out of it:

5 FINGERS. 20th Century-Fox, 1952. James Mason, Danielle Darrieux, Michael Rennie, Walter Hampden. Based on the book Operation Cicero by L. C. Moyzisch. Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz