Foreign Correspondent (1940) - film review

At the request of his editor, New York crime reporter Johnny Jones travels to London to cover the deteriorating political situation in Europe.  The year is 1939 and the storm clouds of war are gathering overhead.  On his arrival in the British capital, Jones meets Van Meer, a Dutch politician who is shortly to sign an important treaty of cooperation between the countries ranged against Nazi Germany.  At a reception in Van Meer’s honour, Jones meets Stephen Fisher, the head of an influential peace party, and his daughter Carol, whom the reporter instantly falls in love with.  Shortly after, Jones witnesses Van Meer’s assassination and sets off in pursuit of his killer.  The chase leads Jones to a windmill in open countryside, where he finds Van Meer, very much alive and the prisoner of a group of Nazi agents.  Realising that he is out of his depth, Jones returns to Fisher, only to discover that the supposed pacifist is not quite what he seems...

Coming hot on the heels of Hitchcock’s first American film, Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent sees a rumbustious return to the genre that is more typical of the director - a fast moving spy thriller of the kind that had been so popular in his latter years in England.  With its superlative cast, relentless pace and impressive set pieces (including a stunning sequence in which an aeroplane is shot down by a German U-boat), the film would provide a template for Hitchcock’s subsequent American thrillers, particularly North By Northwest (1959).   

Foreign Correspondent is notable in that it was the first of Hitchcock’s American films to serve a propaganda function (it should be noted that some of his previous British films had contained a propaganda subtext).   The film offered an appeal to ordinary American citizens to support their country’s entry into World War II at a time when this was being fiercely resisted.  When he saw the film, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels described it as a masterpiece of propaganda that would have a significant influence on enemy countries.   When viewed today, the film’s propaganda elements appear horribly clumsy, far less subtle than what we find in Hitchcock’s following anti-Nazi films, such as Lifeboat (1944).   

The extent to which it influenced public opinion and facilitated the United States’ entry into the war is impossible to gauge, but Foreign Correspondent was unequivocally an immense commercial success.  The film was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, although it won none.  It may not be Hitchcock’s best film – the plot is contrived and needlessly convoluted in places, whilst many of the characters and situations are clichéd – but it is fast and fun, the darkness of the subject matter lightened periodically by the director’s idiosyncratic humour.

© James Travers 2008

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