Dandy WWII espionage caper, with something of a proto-James Bond flavor to it, especially in its high-tech/gas-manufacturing climax. Robert Donat, with his unbeatable gentlemanly dash, is the British bomb-defuser whose Romanian background & chemical expertise make him the perfect man, the only man, for a mission into Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. His job: contact the local resistance while posing as a Romanian collaborator and get inside that chemical plant before the Germans perfect, ship & deploy their latest deadly gas formula. Valerie Hobson’s the suspicious local contact who thinks twice after trusting ‘Tartu,’ fooled by her attraction; and Glynis Johns’ the landlady’s daughter, a brave young patriot whose slipup may blow Donat’s cover. M-G-M journeyman megger Harold S. Bucquet seems positively transformed working in wartime England (British by birth, but a Hollywood career), much helped by Hitchcock’s top British lenser Jack Cox & art director John Bryan who give the film a playful sense of scale & fantasy in the action sequences. (How this was done with rationed wartime resources is a mystery, even if the technical seams show.) The only drawback is trying to find a decent print among subfusc Public Domain editions. Hopefully, something out there is better than the ‘meh’ Film Detective DVD seen here. (No doubt, M-G-M has pristine materials, but won’t put it out. Grrr.)
DOUBLE-BILL: Six years before this, and two years before starring in James Hilton’s GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS, Donat was a double-agent in Russia, saving Marlene Dietrich in another Hilton adaptation, KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOR/’37.
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