Dark Journey (1937)
Directed by Victor Saville

Film Review

Perhaps bleakly anticipating the war that was to come, Dark Journey was one of a number of films made in Britain in the late 1930s that were set during the First World War and provided readymade propaganda entertainment for when WWII got underway in 1939.  Another notable example was Michael Powell's The Spy in Black (1939), and it is no accident that the Germanic lead of this film and Dark Journey were played by one in the same man, Conrad Veidt, who was by this stage in his career close to being typecast as German officers of various persuasions.

Veidt first made a name for himself in Germany in the silent era, in expressionistic masterpieces that included Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) and Orlacs Hände (1924).  After fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he enjoyed a successful career in England before succumbing to the lure of Hollywood in the early 1940s.  He is probably most famous today for playing the villainous Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942).  Despite his typecasting, Veidt was an actor of remarkable range and ability and had no difficult engaging an audience's sympathies with his complex and humane character portrayals, even when he was cast as the bad guy.

In Dark Journey, Conrad Veidt is paired up with a comparative newcomer, Vivien Leigh, not long before she was given the star-making role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939).  What is perhaps most remarkable about this little known film is how two such contrasting actors manage to work off each other, each illuminating the other and adding depth and substance to the other's performance.  How could the ice-cool Veidt fail to melt under the fiery onslaught from Leigh?  Their chemistry is so intense you can feel it caressing your skin, and this is what makes the film's fairly predictable ending not just poignant but utterly, and unforgivably cruel.

Victor Saville was hardly the most distinguished of British filmmakers but, inspired by his two phenomenally accomplished lead actors, he performs a small miracle with the so-so script and modest budget that his producer Alexander Korda foisted on him, ultimately delivering one of the most moving war time dramas to be made in Britain in the 1930s.  It seems trite to describe Dark Journey as the British equivalent to Casablanca, but it's a description that fits astonishingly well.  How tragic that Veidt and Leigh never had the chance to work together again - their separation and anticipated reunion at the end of the film isn't just symbolic, it is also highly prophetic.

Film Synopsis

Towards the end of the First World War, Madeleine Goddard makes frequent trips between Paris and Stockholm, ostensibly to supply expensive dresses to her wealthy Swedish clientele.  In fact, she is a German spy who conceals coded messages in the garments she pretends to deliver.  All is well until she meets Baron Karl Von Marwitz, a German officer who has been invalided out of the war and now seeks a quite life in Sweden.  The two embark on a passionate but short-lived love affair, which ends with each discovering the other's real identity.  Von Marwitz is a leading member of the German secret service, whilst Madeleine is in fact a double agent working for British and French intelligence...