While his next three writing assignments saw Howard Estabrook adapting stories by Alexander Dumas, William Saroyan & Thornton Wilder, this WWII spy yarn is boilerplate nonsense. Released before Pearl Harbor, it begins with the war already on in a London Blitz meet-cute between concert singer Ilona Massey (secret Nazi agent broadcasting info via musical code) and U.S. Consulate lawyer George Brent (secret undercover FBI agent). But this budding romance turns trio when music critic Basil Rathbone (secret undercover Scotland Yard man) horns in. The flirtation level is mad, and when Massey isn’t around, the men’s whispered confidences play like boy-to-boy tête-à-têtes which also comes off as flirting. It's as if Noël Coward updated DESIGN FOR LIVING for wartime.* With even more complications once they all go Stateside (carrier pigeons; Nazi cabals; a sharp-shooting assassin; radio broadcasts in musical code); you might wish they had decided to revive DFL! Brent, Rathbone & Massey’s brittle style might be just right for Coward. No such luck; with journeyman director Tim Whelan unable to stop the plot from falling apart and lenser Hal Mohr unable to do much with unadorned interiors or Massey’s froideur.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Coward’s DESIGN FOR LIVING, very freely adapted in 1933 (and not necessarily for the worse) by Ben Hecht & Ernst Lubitsch for Gary Cooper, Fredric March & Miriam Hopkins , has seen its rep only grow over the years. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/design-for-living-1933.html
No comments:
Post a Comment