This 1943 movie is more of movie history interest than a thrilling thriller, but is somewhat entertaining, too, on its own, and fits with my series of epinions about books and movies with Americans blundering about abroad. The movie history angles are (1) that it is the last movie Joan Crawford made for MGM, where she had worked since 1925 (MGM was dumping many of its earlier female stars, including Greta Garbo, Norman Shearer, and two-time Academy Award winner Luise Rainer, all of who stopped making movies in 1942) and (2) it is the last movie in which Conrad Veidt appeared. Veidt had played the somnambulist who was in "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari," and was "The Student of Prague." He fled Germany when Hitler came to power and ironically is most remembered by American audiences as the ruthless Nazi commander in "Casablanca." In his last film, however, he got to play a resistance figure, Count Hassert Seidel.

Plot

Based on a novel by the once popular suspense novelist Helen MacInnes, "Above Suspicion" has a complicated plot. The complication is that the secret agents are sent off not knowing who their contact is. Indeed, to get to the German scientist who has developed magnetic mines that move to ships rather than needing to be struck by ships before exploding, the agents must wait to be contacted and indirectly informed of where to go to make the next contact, and indirectly informed of where to go to make the next contact. And then, one step behind the Gestapo, they must improvise and outsmart the Gestapo (something that happened more on screen than in real life, it seems to me, though fantasies about how things are going are not unknown to the present US administration).

Mood

The mood is odd. The first half (or nearly half) is more a comedy than an espionage thriller. It strikes me as being not only influenced by Alfred Hitchock's wry 1930s films " The Lady Vanishes", "The 39 Steps", and (in, one crucial echo, "The Man Who Knew Too Much) but forward to prefiguring "North by Northwest." It is not that the male and female leads are at odds. They are united, but their trail is filled with fairly comic difficulties.

Absurdities continue, especially in the costuming the couple undertakes, but it seems to me that the movie is more entertaining — and certainly more original — before it gets into quite standard-issue chases and fights and narrow escapes. The balance of comedy and thriller tips to the latter in the second half of the movie, and the absurdities are not longer played for laughs.

Roles and their players

Basil Rathbone phones in a performance as the cultured, Oxford-educated Gestapo chief of Innsbruck, Count Hassert Seidel. He played many villains (alternating with playing Sherlock Holmes), but generally they were more entertaining nasties than what he delivered to this project.

Conrad Veidt is pallid as the local aristocratic competition. Many of the parts of the contacts along the way from Oxford to an English country inn to Paris to Innsbruck and over the border to Italy are livelier than Rathbone and Veidt.

Fred MacMurray and Joan Crawford make a plausible couple (Richard and Frances Myles), though it gratuitously strains believability for Crawford to have to try to play an Oxford student of MacMurray's. It is necessary for British military intelligence to hijack their honeymoon, but they could have been sweethearts in America who are just getting married. Crawford was too old to play a student (not just too old to play a student of MacMurray's). Beyond that, however, she is quite good for the part in that what it requires is an American woman being a "good sport" and going along with the travails of a strange mission. In playing a part out of her usual repertoire, Crawford was being a "good sport" in a strange Hollywood mission (the partner of a secret agent in a thriller and having to adopt some unglamorous disguises along the way).

It is possible to believe that MacMurray as an American Rhodes scholar who stayed to teach at Oxford and undertook spying duty, though if one pauses to think about it, it seems very unlikely he would put the woman he loves and has just married into so much danger. It is one thing for a couple to have to escape the Nazis, but quite another to go into the Nazi lair... (Indeed, honeymooning in the Tyrol in 1939 is astounding in-itself!) If one can avoid thinking too much about such a mission (with no warnings about Rathbone), it is possible to enjoy their co-operation in figuring out where they are supposed to go.

Misc.

Richard Thorpe, who directed 181 mostly forgotten movies, (plus "Jailhouse Rock") moves things along in studio-shot locales that are supposed to be European.

I thought that it was interesting that a wartime movie completely accepted the annexation of Austria. (This is akin to the enrollment of Libya in the column of "freedom" touted by Dubyah.) MacMurray always refers to where they are as "Germany." The one character who insists on Austrianness is the mother of the Basil Rathbone character. There were certainly many refugee Austrians in Hollywood who made the distinction and someone who had been climbing every summer in the Tyrol for years before, as MacMurray's character supposedly has, would seem to me likely to have been accustomed to speaking of it as "Austria." Not that I want to reduce the culpability of Austria for Nazi crimes! ("Only the Viennese could make Beethoven [born in Bonn] Austrian, and Hitler [born in Linz, Austria] German" is a fittingly sarcastic characterization of the country that elected Kurt Waldheim its president...)

The movie is in black-and-white, but the song "Red, Red Rose" is recurrently used as an identification signal, and Crawford's ridiculous hat is repeatedly referred to as red, so the cover in which her hat and clothes are green rates special condemnation for misrepresentation of the product!





Recommended:
Yes