Foreign Correspondent

I remembered this as one of the better Hitchcocks but was surprised by the sweep of the staging. I usually think of him as indifferent to setting -- outside of his own narrow narrative purposes -- so that he repeatedly resorts to back projection or obvious stage sets. But here he offers vivid scenes of London and Amsterdam in the run up to World War II, as well as the set pieces that are his own motivation. With his background as set designer, Hitchcock exemplifies storyboarding technique. The point of the movie is truly to render such pre-visualized scenes as the escape of an assassin shot from above so all you see is a waving sea of umbrellas, or most impressively, a near silent sequence set inside a windmill, where intrepid reporter Joel McCrea spies on Nazi plotting while the huge gears of the windmill turn, and the camera keeps finding revelatory graphic perspectives. I remembered this famous sequence as the climax of the movie, but in fact it occurs less than halfway through. The other notable aspect of the film is its atypical topicality, capturing the moment when Britain went to war while the U.S. retained its uneasy neutrality, with Hitchcock the recent Hollywood immigrant offering moral support to his native England, though he is usually not blamed for the final propagandistic sequence evoking Edward R. Murrow’s broadcasts to America during the London Blitz. (1940, dvd, r.) *7*