(1940)
3
Bruce Eder
In 1938, Michael Powell completed a movie for Alexander Korda's London Films entitled The Spy In Black, a World War I espionage thriller with a screenplay by Emeric Pressburger, starring Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson. For reasons best known to himself, Korda held the film back from release for almost a year, and then issued it as the war broke out between England and Germany -- although it was set during World War I, the plot about a German plan to sink the British fleet anchored at Scapa Flow had a veneer of topicality, and the chemistry between Veidt and Hobson combined to turn it into an unexpected major hit, on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, it was a huge success during the period of the so-called "Phony War," and the blackouts that were enforced -- among the more oft-used shots of London under blackout from late 1939 and early 1940 includes the image of a huge movie marquee showing "The Spy In Black." It was during that same period that Powell and Pressburger decided that a follow-up film was in order. And the result was Contraband. Set during the period of the Phony War, amid blacked out London, it told a tale of suspense and espionage, filled with irony, and topical humor, and romance as well. As England was at war, it was impossible to have Veidt portray a sympathetic German, and so he played a Danish sea captain whose ship is boarded and seized by British authorities in search of contraband. Even this was something of a challenge by Powell and Pressburger to the established sensibilities of the period -- one wasn't supposed to focus patriotic movies upon the plight of neutrals caught up in the war, much less make them justifiably proud and defiant, and sympathetic. Hobson was largely repeating the role that she had played in The Spy In Black, in characteristics and performance if not name, of a capable and independent woman. Their characters still strike sparks, Veidt in perhaps the most romantic role of his entire career and Hobson at her most alluring. Powell and Pressburger managed to have some good-natured fun with the entire notion of the blackout imposed on London by night, and the uneasy situation of aliens living in a city at war, as well as recent politics -- the repeated image of a warehouse filled with busts of Neville Chamberlain, England's discredited appeasement-oriented prime minister, was one of the funniest, most subversive, and most patriotic images to be found in any wartime British thriller. Additionally, Powell paced the action here very fast amid the humor of Pressburger's script, so that the film stacks up very well against Hitchcock's rival contemporary release, the Hollywood-filmed Foreign Correspondent.
cast-crew for Contraband on AllMovie
Contraband (1940)
