Foreign Correspondent (1940, Alfred Hitchcock) (Patreon)

72/100

At least third viewing, last seen 1999. Many of Hitchcock's thrillers feel a bit jerry-rigged—even North by Northwest, one of my all-time favorites, plays like a string of magnificent setpieces hastily stitched together—but I don't think I'd previously noticed how oddly structured Foreign Correspondent is. Some of the lumpiness clearly reflects tension between Hitch and producer Walter Wanger, with the latter pushing for more topicality/jingoism; that tug of war works in the film's favor, I'd argue, though maybe I just appreciate the relatively light touch with which "apathetic, self-interested cynic develops a moral compass" (a trope made iconic shortly thereafter by Casablanca) gets handled here. On the other hand, it's hard to get too invested in a character's dawning awareness of the European threat (HOT EUROPE) when he suddenly all but vanishes from the movie. George Sanders becomes its de facto protagonist for most of the third act, and is so ideally matched with Herbert Marshall—urbane throwdown!—that I found myself wishing he'd been in that role all along, even though the reporter needs to be American and McCrea is totally solid as Johnny Jones aka Huntley Haverstock. Granted, that change would likely affect the romance...but, then, the one we have now is so rushed and perfunctory—apparently inspired by Hitchcock's own marriage!—that any imaginable complication seems like a potential improvement. In any case, Foreign Correspondent now looks to me like second-tier Hitchcock: too disjointed to be fully satisfying as a discrete entity, not quite witty and inspired enough to make that feel irrelevant. 

That's grading/rating on a curve, though. While this no longer strikes me as one of the best films by one of the greatest directors who's ever lived (and I'm not sure how I ever held that opinion in the first place), it's consistently gripping and ultimately, for me at least, quite stirring. Because the assassination scene is a film-studies textbook staple, its sea of jostled umbrellas has always been my primary visual memory; this time around, I was surprised by how brief and unspectacular that moment actually is—effective, to be sure, but not gasp-inducing or anything. Whereas it's hard to imagine anyone not forgetting to breathe while Johnny/Huntley's inside the windmill, as Hitchcock runs through practically every means of creating viewer anxiety on behalf of a person in hiding: the misleading eyeline (drugged Van Meer looks where we think Johnny is; CUT TO: a bird hopping in a shaft of sunlight), the perfectly-timed exposure (Johnny crossing a doorway as the one bad guy facing in his direction pulls a shirt over his head), the accidental error (jacket arm caught in one of the sail's gears), etc. Why does nobody ever cite this sequence as legendary? How did the damn umbrellas steal its thunder? (They're fine.) Edmund Gwenn as the world's most harmless-looking hit man likewise delivers the goods, perfectly demonstrating Hitchcock's definition of suspense—we know his evil intentions, our hero has no clue. There's a first-rate switcheroo (the note ffolliott grabs from Fisher as he departs), some remarkably convincing special effects (I watched one of the Criterion supplements  out of sheer bafflement at how windmills' sails could be turning in the far distance of a matte painting; the answer made me laugh out loud, plus I learned about other mattes that I hadn't even noticed, e.g. most of the Hotel Europe), and perhaps Hitch's most MacGuffin-y MacGuffin (clause 27 of a treaty exists only in two people's memories?). Also, I confess that the tacked-on epilogue always gets to me, despite being outright propaganda—that Pearl Harbor was still over a year away makes Johnny's plea feel retroactively ultra-urgent, and the scene going dark as bombs fall is a FINAL FADE TO BLACK like no other. Still a pretty terrific movie, all in all. I was just wildly overrating it until now.