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Done in the same vein as Fox's 13 Rue Madeleine, but in a somewhat more romantic and melodramatic manner, Irving Pichel's O.S.S. tries to tell the story of the Office of Strategic Services, the espionage arm of the federal government, which was a creation out of necessity for the prosecution of the Second World War. It's nicely paced overall and essentially breaks down into two sections, the opening in which we witness the training of a group of agents and get an account of what trainees have to unlearn to succeed -- and the second, in which Alan Ladd and Geraldine Fitzgerald's characters become the focus of a specific plotline. Pichel does well enough with the material at hand, although one wishes that Frank Tuttle had been given this movie to direct, to see what kind of sharp little edges he would have brought to the material.