I Was a Spy

This was a big budget effort from Gaumont British.Madeleine Carroll was the highest paid British star of the era,and gives a very effective performance.She,Marshall and Veidt would all be in Hollywood by the end of the decade.

Madeleine Carroll plays Martha Cnockhaert, a Belgian nurse who spied for the British during the First World War.

The movie is based on Miss Cnockhaert's memoirs of the same title .... ghost-written by her husband, John 'Jock' McKenna. It's a highly romantic view of the trade, with Herbert Marshall as her lover and fellow spy, Edmund Gwenn as the town's mayor, and Conrad Veidt giving a very creepy performance as the commander of the German occupying forces. Miss Carroll gives a fine, layered performance, and while it is clear this was a major production for Gaumont British, with a large cast of extras, director Victor Saville focuses the camera on her. She's worth it.

There was a spate of women-spies-of-the-Great-War movies about this time from Hollywood. The best remembered one is probably MATA HARI, starring Greta Garbo. Hollywood offered a sexy, Pre-Code vision of espionage. This movie offers a less baroque, more intimate view.

With about twenty million deaths, the first world war wasn't a laughing matter and since it only ended fifteen years before this film was made it's understandable why this takes itself so seriously. When this came out everyone watching it would have lost people very close to them in the war so there is a respectful sense of deference and dignity implicit throughout I WAS A SPY.

Whilst understandable, that respect for the awfulness of The War To End All Wars does mean that watching this is a rather humourless and sombre experience. On that same theme, Madeleine Carroll, our spy (based on a real life nurse) also keeps the smiles to a minimum and plays her role as a rather icy, remote person. That remoteness is however what makes her such a perfect spy. She is no blank page though - you can see that there's a lot going on in her mind however you just don't know what but - you want to know - that's the sign of a good actor. There is no question whatsoever when you yourself are watching this that you're looking at a real story with real people. Everyone's acting is simply so good and timeless that it's not like watching acting.

As you would expect from Gaumont-British which was our premier, big-budget motion picture studio back in the thirties, this is a very classy, high production value picture. The sets are impressive, the camerawork is imaginative, the script feels authentic and director Victor Saville builds that sense of tension and anxiety up so subtly that you don't realize that by the end you're literally sitting on the edge of your seat.

Since 1933 there have been countless similar films of this nature and a lot of them are obviously going to be better, this however still stands its ground and is still entertaining, interesting and satisfying.

I Was A Spy is one of the better pictures to emerge from the early days of British talkies. It certainly stands up well against its American competition, which sad to say, many other British pictures of this period don't. The cast is uniformly good, and Madeleine Carroll is lovely as always. Perhaps the only reservations I have in this area is the way in which Herbert Marshall can deliver his lines a bit mechanically at times. Victor Saville's direction is nicely understated, yet the film can be quite exciting at times. There are two memorable scenes - the church parade, and the quietly effective closing moments of the film. Well worth seeing.

This briskly paced, highly suspenseful cinematic rendering of the war-time exploits of Martha Cnockhaert, a Belgian girl who reluctantly engaged in espionage work for the Allies during the Great War, is a must see for all who appreciate war films sans the usual cheap, one-sided displays of gratuitous propaganda masquerading as history that the various film factories seem to have a penchant for putting out. A great deal of the credit must go to director Victor Saville, who managed to refrain from incorporating any of the typically lurid tales of German atrocities allegedly perpetrated on the prostrate Belgians that had become the mainstay of the British disinformation network throughout the greater part of the war itself. The actual situation, as this film so ably depicts, was bad enough. For example, largely on account of the British naval blockade, the occupying Germans had to impose severe privations on the Belgian people who, as a result, were forced to hoard what little food there was for their own survival. Indeed, it was the witnessing of the constant abuse inflicted on her café-owning parents that spurred Martha to overcome her initial fear and enlist her services for the Belgian underground.

The beautiful Madeleine Carroll gives a convincing, at times deeply moving, portrait of the reluctant Belgian spy whose work as a volunteer nurse in a hospital for wounded Germans complicates her efforts to aid in their ultimate destruction. Indeed, ironically it is her dedicated work in relieving the suffering of war-- not to mention her exquisite beauty and charm- that endears her to the German commandant-- played by the great Conrad Veidt-- enabling her her to carry out more effectively her clandestine activities.

Perhaps the supreme irony of this film, however, resides in the fact that within 10 years, the woman who would play a volunteer nurse/spy in a movie would in real life give up her film career to volunteer as a real life Red Cross nurse in Italy during the sequel to the Great War. For that, Madeleine Carroll will, indeed, always be fondly remembered.