When The Winds Of War Do Get Stirred Up- Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (1940)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Foreign Correspondent, starry Lorraine Day, Joel McCrea, Herbert Marshall, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, 1940

Seth Garth and Alden Riley have already gone over in some detail the Sir Alfred Hitchcock problem, no, the problem of heavyweight male movers and shakers in all walks of upscale life, here cinema, and their sexually predatory and in some cases criminal practices toward the women, the professional women, they work with. The problem of placing in some cinematic perspective the relationship between the cultural importance of their work and their gutter-worthy personal lives as they affect other members of the human race. What I want to address is a different Sir Alfred Hitchcock problem, the problem of using his films in the immediate pre-World War II period and beyond, a problem that also affected the extreme bachelor coupling of Sir Sherlock Holmes and Sir John Watson in the same period, of mixing cinematic values with low-rent propaganda for the Allied, no, the British side in that epic war. The film under review could stand alone as a good piece of cinema but is marred toward the end with some “speeches” that could have been written by Sir Winston Churchill’s speech writers in Britannia’s darkest hours.

That is all I have to say about that aspect of the film, Foreign Correspondent, except that looking backward on the plotline the whole thing reeked more than a little as a rebuff to the American Firsters like Charles Lindberg and Homer Martin in order to get America on board the European fiasco. The start is pretty straight forward in a time when commercial newspapers were a major source of news about the greater world and not fighting the culture wars over “fake news,” social media and Everyman’s opinion disguised as reportage. The editor and owner of the New York World     

wanted to know more about the impeding war clouds in Europe than the hand-outs from the various embassies which his current crew of so-called correspondents were spewing forth between cocktails at five. Enter Johnny Reporter, it could be any name, played by winsome Joel McCrea, hungry, raw and ignorant of any of the play in Europe except he had a nose for grabbing some serious news and riding it out like with a storm.    

Assignment one, which our boy Johnny never got past since this turned out to be his Pulitzer moment, find out what some old- time peacenik diplomat thinks is going to happen and what the terms of a peace alliance were all about. No problem as he runs into the guy he needed to see minute one. Except that meeting started a whole series of turns and twists which will lead him on a merry, merry goose chase. See the dippy diplomat got himself “killed” while attending, or going to a attend a world peace conference sponsored by a British national who is running a peace party operation, or so the general naïve public think since there is plenty going on which looks very suspicious after Johnny and another holy goof reporter working his own angel angles and a naïve if attractive daughter of said peace operative trace things to a windmill in the boondocks of Holland, in the outback of the country where the whole fight for peace is taking place.

That dippy diplomat was not killed but had been taken hostage to get a phrase from the secret peace agreement which might just have averted the war. (Ho hum, we have been down that road before when nations are hell-bent on war.) Taken hostage by forces unknown except they all seen to speak German when given a chance and so the chase in on. The twists and turns going running round like some second generation running kind until it becomes inescapable that the peace operative (with that naive but attractive daughter) is pulling all the strings-is an agent of the unnamed fascists like a good many other well-bred and snobbish English gentry who saw Hitler and Mussolini as the saviors against those troublesome workers who were always asking for something or other. Kept order and trains on time not necessarily in that order.   

Here’s the beauty of the whole charade, and the political baloney part as well. Once exposed as a treacherous agent of the night-takers swarming over Europe like vultures our good English gentleman with the nice manners flees London and with naïve if attractive daughter in tow heads to, where else, neutral America, once war is declared on a great looking airplane which seemed like the lap of luxury. Also on board are the dogged Johnny R, and his buddy intrepid reporter. Out in neutral waters the airplane is fired upon by a German destroyer and goes down in the briny drink, the Atlantic. Among the survivors Johnny, Intrepid, Attractive Daughter and Traitor Blue Dad. As a gesture of his suddenly found “patriotism” Traitor Blue Dad slips himself into that briny deep, the Atlantic when the wing of the plane they were floating on couldn’t handle the weight. So that gesture, fake unlike all the stuff he did for the Nazis and their ilk, gets him a pass on the traitor list. Baloney, double baloney.