Starring Joel McCrea, Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, George Sanders, Edmund Gwenn, Harry Davenport, Albert Basserman, Robert Benchley

(7-Very Good Film)

Exciting. Uneven. Hokey.

Mr. Powers: I don’t want any more economists, sages, or oracles bombinating over our cables. I want a reporter! Somebody who doesn’t know the difference between an -ism and a kangaroo. A good, honest crime reporter. That’s what the Globe needs. That’s what Europe needs!

Wanting a fresh set of eyes, the New York Morning Globe sends crime reporter, John Jones (McCrea), overseas to Europe, where a second world war is brewing and several diplomats gather to invoke peace. Instead, Van Meer (Basserman), a leading diplomat, is assassinated and Jones gets thrown into a whirlwind conspiracy of spies and foreign plots. He’s determined to break the story and get the girl, Carol Fisher (Day), in the process. If Foreign Correspondent afforded Hitchcock a greater budget than his previous work in his home country of England, it also demanded he appeal more conspicuously than ever before as a sort of war propaganda. Certain touches, monologues seem hokey now, 80 years later; the use of our (America’s) national anthem in its ending credits, for example. Add to this, the opening act far exceeds the following two so that the film begins to feel anticlimactic for the majority of its running time. As soon as Van Meer gets shot in that spectacular sequence with the assassin and the umbrellas, Foreign Correspondent has reached its apex. Despite its deficiencies, it’s a sprawling, exciting film with an incredible opening and a slow but satisfying conclusion.

-Walter Tyrone Howard-

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