Intriga extranjera

"Foreign Intrigue," a 1956 film starring Robert Mitchum, starts out promisingly enough and peters out. Despite filming in color in France, Sweden, and Monaco, even the film's beauty can't overcome its slow pace and dull script.

Mitchum plays Dave Bishop, who works for an international man of mystery, Victor Danemore. Danemore dies of a heart attack suddenly, and Bishop wonders why every single person he encounters wants to know if Danemore said anything before he died.

Even after working for him, Bishop doesn't know much about him, but he endeavors to find out. He learns that Danemore went to Vienna once a year and goes there.

Danemore's home there is in a slum, his housekeeper is blind, and can only supply him with one name, Olaf Lindquist from Sweden. Bishop finds Lindquist's home, but the man himself is dead.

Bishop and Lindquist's beautiful daughter Brita (Ingrid Thulin) fall for one another; meanwhile, it's obvious her mother is keeping a secret.

Soon Bishop finds himself being followed by one man, Spring (Frederic O'Brady) who won't tell him who he works for, bad-mouthed by Danemore's widow (Genevieve Page) to Brita and her mother, and approached by a group of men who want the names of the men Danemore met yearly in Vienna.

First of all, despite compliments on the music, it was totally overbearing, not to mention loud and intrusive. If you liked it, fine, it was just too over the top for me.

Secondly, this film took way too long to make its point. In the beginning, it was intriguing, but then it began to drag.

Thirdly, we think we're going to find something out and guess what, after all this, we don't.

Robert Mitchum is laid-back and sexy as usual - in this instance, I can't tell if his persona helped the movie or hurt it. He was always a very deliberate actor and perfect for noir - I realize some people call this a noir, and perhaps it was, but the payoff just wasn't there.

It's hard for me to imagine Mitchum hurting a film - I think in this case, I'll have to blame the script and the fact that some time could have been edited out.

Promising start - disappointing finish - pretty to look at.

Foreign Intrigue (1956)

An underrated transition film, a low budget affair that is pure European color and style. Visually, it almost presages the Euro-American "Charade" which was decidedly more up budget. Here, the director, an unknown Sheldon Reynolds, takes advantage of all the empty spaces and long pauses the pace required. The lighting is flat, almost anti-noir, with widescreen grandness and yet an oddly impersonal intimacy. Not to be contradictory--the scenes are generally quiet, with close conversations, but everything is filmed from a certain, and constant, distance.

It is this steady, quiet pace that makes the film work. And Robert Mitchum. He needs no explanation. The first of the two or three main women he connects with is a bit false, but the main one is a caricature of the Nordic beauty, and with sincere energy and charm. At times it really does look like she is smiling at Mitchum, not his character, as if she can't believe she's touring Stockholm, etc., with this famous man, and the movie gets away with it. Mitchum for his part keeps his cool, except for the necessary fist fight once or twice.

It's 1956, and international intrigues like this are slowly rising into a genre of their own. People come and go, scenes are not what they seem at first, people have false identities and foreign accents. The big theme (too big to believe, but that's okay, it's supposed to be) is that realignment of global power after WWII. The real thing, made up of shadowy individuals who seem to be above nationality, and only know about intrigue, money, and winning at any cost.

I don't want to pump this up too much. It's slow at times, and the acting not always right on. The effects (the atmosphere, the fights, etc) are sometimes so archly false you can't quite accept it even as theatrical, but just a cheap. But that's the exception. Fall into the pace of it and it's not bad at all.

Robert Mitchum, employee of a mysterious rich guy with a mysterious source of income, gets involved in FOREIGN INTRIGUE when he seeks out the source of his newly dead employer's seven figure lifestyle on the Riviera. Will the natural scenery of the Riviera, Sweeden and Vienna overwhelm the scenery provided by Bob's bodacious costars?

This is an entertaining enough movie -- and would have been a lot better without the atrocious musical score -- but it is slumming for Mitchum, who probably took the role for the free visits to European hotspots. The main interest IS Mitchum, who acts the role in an interesting fashion. By acting, in each scene, that he just can't quite believe the mother lode of BS that he has just been handed by some suspect, spy type, cute girl, or plot development, he sort of steps aside from the move, and whispers to us that he knows this is all nonsense, but bear with him, the movie won't be too bad. And, because he does that, it really isn't.

Now, frankly, this is a dead-end as an acting approach, and the cul-de-sac at the end is Roger Moore at the close of his James Bond period. But it works for this movie and this actor, where a straighter approach probably just would have failed. We should be grateful, though, that a sequel, suggested by the ending, was not produced.

Foreign Intrigue is as bland and generic as its title. Its scantily credentialed director/writer/producer, Sheldon Reynolds, did an early-1950s TV series with the same name, so this movie looks like a bid for big-screen immortality. Alas, it's one of those polyglot productions that suggests financing flowed from several European countries, with strings attached to several cast members; there's no other way to account for their presence.

A wealthy man of mystery drops dead in his villa on the Riviera. His American press agent (Robert Mitchum) finds him but suspicions grow when he's asked four times in succession if his employer `said anything' before he died. So Mitchum sets out to discover who the man was and how he accumulated his fortune. He starts with the merry widow (Genevieve Page) and travels on to Vienna and Stockholm, where he falls for the daughter (Ingrid Thulin) of a deceased industrialist whom may have been a blackmail target. Mitchum finds that he, too, is being followed....

Foreign Intrigue brings to mind Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin of the previous year, memories of which emphatically ought not to be freshened. There's little true suspense, though the score, by Paul Durand and Charlie Norman, insists that yes, there is. Reynolds tosses in a little Alfred Hitchock here, a little Carol Reed there, but to little avail. About three-quarters of the way through, the picture reaches a lugubrious crescendo by revealing a vast global conspiracy harking back to the Third Reich. The only sensible reaction to all this is Mitchum's, who knew a good paycheck when he saw one and saunters through the movie with his eyes half-shut, as only he could do. Even so, he remains the only reason to sit through this foreign travelogue devoid of intrigue.

In order to review this movie, you need to put yourself back into the 50s when it was made. WW2 was just a decade before (closer than Desert Storm is to us), and the cold war was raging. Tales of spies, traitors, and exotic locations were just the ticket for mid-50s audiences. FOREIGN INTRIGUE has plenty of interesting turns and surprises, but it seems to be trying too hard to mix THIRD MAN with MR ARKADIN and perhaps a bit of WW2 Hitchcock (Sabotage, Foreign Correspondent?). I'm not a big Mitchum fan, but he gives his usual looming, low-key performance, and the supporting players do well. My real reason for watching this film (and I've been waiting over 30 years to catch it) is to see Frederick O'Brady, who plays the heavy (he was reviewed at the time as "out-Lorrying Peter Lorre."). He was my French teacher in 1973-74 at the Eastman School of Music and a great raconteur. He had enormous talent in music, languages, writing, and of course acting (having worked with Orson Welles in ARKADIN, plus Jean Renoir, Roger Vadim, and others). If you can find his autobiography ALL TOLD, you'll be fascinated. He told us that Mitchum tried to teach him to drive during the making of this movie, resulting in a wrecked car. Some thought this would be O'Brady's ticket to Hollywood, but instead French directors dropped him, assuming he would be asking too much money for "lowly" French pictures. He spent many years on stage and never had another juicy film part like "Spring" in this picture. If you enjoy the spy genre and aren't in a big hurry for lots of blazing action, find this movie!