After the entertaining rush-job of THE BLUE DAHLIA, from Raymond Chandler’s only original screenplay, Paramount slipped Alan Ladd into this lackluster WWII spy yarn as soon as he’d wrapped his military service requirement. With a script by founding James Bond screen author Richard Maibaum (13 in all), there’s fun in spotting future 007 spy-in-the-making tropes as Ladd and a group of O.S.S. (the WWII pre-C.I.A.) undercover trainees pick up the tricks of the trade along with a few advanced devices (shooting pipe; miniature camera) ‘Q’ might have demonstrated to James Bond. But once Ladd gets dropped into Nazi-occupied France with co-star Geraldine Fitzgerald to find their resistance liaison and send back accurate bomb-run coordinates, director Irving Pichel goes into auto-drive, even when two team members come to grief and a Nazi officer takes an unwelcome shine to Fitzgerald. Things pick up in the last act with a tunnel bomb gone awry just as romance comes into view for our leads. But elsewise, pretty standard doings. Even with a Hail Mary pass at an ‘honest’ downbeat ending, not enough here for emotional investment.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Warners also released an O.S.S. suspenser in '46, the Fritz Lang/Gary Cooper underachiever CLOAK AND DAGGER, now mainly of interest for how it anticipates Hitchcock’s TORN CURTAIN/’66. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/cloak-and-dagger-1946.html OR: Pichel’s big effort that year, the wildly successful soaper TOMORROW IS FOREVER. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/11/tomorrow-is-forever-1946.html
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