Secret Agent

Movie Review: Secret Agent

Year of Release: 1936
Country of Origin: UK
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young

Plot outline: After three British agents are assigned to assassinate a mysterious German spy during World War I, two of them become ambivalent when their duty to the mission conflicts with their consciences (IMDb).

An assortment of Hitchcock's greatest early movies are featured in a three-disc collection. Based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, Secret Agent is one of those affairs in which practically every member of the cast turns out to be a spy. It is a defect of the screen narrative that all the spies seem to be continually engaged in melodramatic shadow boxing, but the script never really makes out a case for the necessity of spying and never convince you that there is anything in Geneva worth spying on. The movie is marred by inexpert camera technique, film editing whose incorrectness hits one between the eyes, and strangely uneven sound recording which, at one point, simply causes the screen to go dead. Madeleine Carroll is a bit above her surroundings, and she unluckily gets mixed up in the most terrible clichés. But there are scattered high-lights, e.g. Peter Lorre plays one of the most amusing and somehow one of the most wistfully appealing trigger men, a homicidal virtuoso, a student of the theory as well as the practice of garroting and throat-slitting, repulsively curly and Oriental in make-up. The sequence in which he regretfully shoves a charming but suspected gentleman (Percy Marmont) from the peak of a Swiss Alp, only to discover later that he was the wrong man, is a priceless one. His harmless and ineffectual little gallantries with servant girls are also admirably carried off. (NYT)

My judgement: **1/2 out of 4 stars