ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.
InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Delight Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.
LeonLouisRicci Early British Wartime Effort from Director Michael Powell. It has a Light Touch with Some Amazing Noirish Flourishes. A Male-Female Team of Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson are Thrown Together Against Some Nazis and the Adventure Takes Them Through London Blackouts and Underground Cement Caverns with Secret Entrances and Ominous Elevators.Beneath Nightclubs with Gaudy Fashions and Cuisine and Floor Shows Like "White Negro" that are Quite Bizarre, as is a Musical Group of Female Banjo Pickers with Artificial Glass Legs. It is All Rather Surreal. Our Heroes get to Engage Banter with Some Sexual Innuendos and a Bondage Scene as They Combine Efforts for an Entertaining Romp that May be a bit Heavy on the Humor but the Thing Works Wonderfully.It is Michael Powell's Inventive Camera Work and Expressionism that Makes this Stand Out and One can See that the British were Developing, as were Their American Cousins, a Seemingly Unconscious Style of Filmmaking that would Become Known as Film-Noir in its Various Degrees of Genre Bending and Definition.
writers_reign Never underestimate the power of hype and the willingness of impressionable snobs to praise the mediocre. If people were easily pleased in 1940 it seems little has changed in almost 60 years. I accept that Powell and Pressburger completists will want to see and/or own this film but just because the team turned out a couple of half decent movies doesn't mean that every early effort was gold dust. The year before the same team had enjoyed a minor success - not, surely, that hard in wartime - with the Spy In Black and figured why not team Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson again and this time, improbable and unrealistic as it is, have them fall in love in between escaping from a spy ring. All sorts of people pop up here and it's amazing that the likes of Peter Bull, Leon Genn and Bernard Miles went on to appear in anything else let alone enjoy reasonable careers. For completists only.
max von meyerling What a delightful film this is. It's true that this film is concocted out of the same ingredients of contemporary Hitchcock film - spy suspense and romance between stand offish lovers wrapped up in a crust of a comedy of manners but it's interesting to see the results from a different chef. There is even a climactic scene in a factory which makes busts of Neville Chamberlain. The little sexual mushrooms that Hitchcock likes to strew through his films are here even more perverse with particular emphasis on bondage and pain. Here is Conrad Veidt at his most affable and most romantic, hardly the same man who pisses ice cubes he was in Casablanca, his most indelible role. Valerie Hobson is the perfect combination of repressed middle class woman and devil may care adventuress. They have a brilliant chemistry together, sort of a neo-lithic Steed and Peel. It remains to be seen if any film today can ever capture this type of pairing, with the forthcoming MR. & MRS. SMITH (itself an old Hitchcock title) promising a cartoon like special effects and martial arts based attempt at mutual destruction. O tempes, o mores.The action can be a little more than the merely concocted. As in farce, people do certain things in certain ways, its seems, just to keep the story moving along. So there are massive plot holes. Its the old John Ford story, about why he didn't have the Indians simply shoot the horses in STAGECOACH (if they did there wouldn't be a movie!). There was another reason d'etre for CONTRABAND - wartime British propaganda. CONTRABAND was made with the co-operation of two British Government ministries including the Office of Economic Warfare. It would seem that one film's goals was to create a positive sympathy among Scandinavians by having the lions share of defeating the Nazi spy ring accomplished by the hereto neutral Danes handily recruited from a restaurant evocatively named The Viking. This British hope of was before the German invasion of Denmark and the instantaneous crumbling of Danish military defenses. The climactic fight in the factory making heroic busts of Neville Chamberlain was not meant to be ironic (a bust is used to knock out a spy followed with a Bond like quip "They said he was tough."). It is doubtful that two government ministries would have co-operated with a film which made fun of the Prime Minister during wartime. In fact all Civil servants and serving military men are seen as competent, thoughtful efficient and humane. But all of these elements are held subtly in the background, as is a virtual encyclopedia of ordinary life in London, especially the demands of the blackout.However all these are subsidiary interests to the real focus of the film, the relationship between Veidt and Hobson. In many way this was a repackaging of their pairing in a previous Powell film, THE SPY IN BLACK, which ends, in romantic , unsatisfactorily, i.e. she goes back to her husband and he dies. Here they go on together, no doubt spending the next few years giving the Jerrys conniption fits, in and out of bondage. Oh yes. There is bondage, perhaps even freakier than in a Hitchcock film. There is no mistaking the B&D complete with a pillar.The good old days when you could get right to the edge and it would be read as merely the hero and heroine being tied up but no mistake, this is the real thing.
fordraff The ment about this film from Kino Video led me to think I was going to see an exciting spy story with noirish overtones and a Hitchcockian twist.It is nothing of the sort.If Hitchcock had made this film, smooth, suave Cary Grant would have had the lead, and he would have been opposite a cool, sophisticated blonde. Before the film had ended, Grant would have melted her coolness for a final kiss or, as in "North By Northwest," an implication of sexual surrender.Here we are asked to accept Conrad Veidt, at age 47 and looking every year of it just three years before his death, in the Cary Grant role and Valerie Hobson, twenty-four years his junior, in the cool blonde part. There is just about no one further removed from Cary Grant than Conrad Veidt. However, it was interesting to see him playing someone other than a villain, but at the same time, I realized that such roles were his forte.Of course, Valerie Hobson isn't blond. And here she looked like Merle Oberon and acted as stiffly. There were absolutely no sparks between Hobson and Veidt, to say nothing of the dialogue which was totally unwitty and without any double entendres. I suspect that Kino's publicity about the Hitchcockian touch had in mind Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps," where Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll must put up with each other against their wills.I cared nothing for the characters. The film had no narrative thrust (what happens next?). It was a total waste of my time.
