Backed by Alexander Korda’s glossy production, Victor Saville’s smoothly muscular direction and especially as lit by dream-team cinematographers Georges Périnal & Harry Stradling, Vivien Leigh looks spectacularly pretty in this stylish WWI romance & espionage number. She’s second-billed to Conrad Veidt, in a rare English language romantic lead (an odd couple in many ways, even in height where he towers over her by nearly a foot), the both of them Spies in Disguise working undercover near the end of the war out of neutral Sweden. She runs a posh dress shop and brings in coded secrets woven into the patterns & hems of the latest Paris styles; he’s a wealthy Baron who left Germany to live the safe, luxurious, bachelor’s life. Only he’s secretly running German covert ops out of Sweden. Lovers and enemies, but not coming to a head since neither knows the full story . . . for a while. Glamorous stuff, and with more action than you might think, mostly in the opening and closing scenes. Some of the model ships at sea less than convincing, as was typical at the time, the action far more effective at closer range. How different this one would have been a year later when background rumors of war were growing louder by the day. So, in addition to a love story, and its resolution, you get a feel for the attitudes just before the political tide turned as another World War became inevitable.
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