Secret People

Maybe the most important thing about Secret People is the fact that William Wyler took a look at this film and decided that his next film Roman Holiday would star an unknown Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn plays a supporting role as the younger sister of Valentina Cortesa. Both are refugees from some unknown eastern European country where the two of them had their father killed by the local dictator.

Audrey was still a kid when she and Valentina came over, but now she's grown up and an aspiring dancer. As for Cortesa she's content enough until Serge Reggiani shows from the old country. He's with the opposition to the dictator and they want to kill him in London while he's on a state visit. So far it sounds like the plot of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.

But this film is told from the point of view of the conspirators and how slowly Cortesa is drawn into their web of intrigue despite a lot of misgivings. Every agonizing thought so registers with Cortesa and her performance even after Hepburn who has adjusted well to Great Britain and wants to pursue a career in dance.

As for Reggiani the years have turned him into quite the fanatic. Today he would be called a terrorist.

Secret People is done a bit unevenly in pace, there are spots it drags. But Cortesa and Reggiani carry it through and it's a milestone of sorts for Audrey Hepburn.

British thriller from Ealing Studios and director Thorold Dickinson. In 1930, Maria (Valentina Cortese) and her little sister Nora (Audrey Hepburn) are sent to London from Italy to protect them from the rising militarism there. By 1937, the two women have acclimated to their new lives, although Maria is becoming restless in her cafe job. When she runs into Louis (Serge Reggiani), a young man that she knew back in Italy, Maria quickly becomes enamored with him, and fails to see that he is using her for a sinister purpose. Also featuring Charles Goldner, Angela Fouldes, Megs Jenkins, Irene Worth, Reginald Tate, Norman Williams, Michael Ripper, and Athene Seyler.

This murky espionage thriller is short on thrills but not completely without merit. Cortese isn't bad as a woman in over her head. Hepburn, as an aspiring ballet dancer, has her biggest pre-Roman Holiday role. She's cute, but her role isn't fleshed out enough for her to make any sort of acting impression.

This is a seriously under-rated work of classical British film art on a compelling subject and is as relevant to London life today as it ever was. Considering this film was released in 1952 it explores so perceptively the path from praiseworthy ideology, through working for a noble cause, into terrifying involvement in an act of pure terrorism. Right through you are steadily but inexorably drawn with a lure of truth and justice, into a slowly evolving web of intrigue, conspiracy and ultimately murder, and it leaves you wondering at which point do you actually stray from idealism and decency into cold depravity? Given the '50s context, centred on an urban minority family, the actual plot is still frighteningly relevant and this film is surely just waiting for a re-make to bring it chillingly up to date. Until then, if you can find a copy of this film, watch it - its a vital and absorbing education, in the grand old style, on the strong subject of ideology.

Secret People (1951)

A British production, and very much about their view on the coming of World War II. It's gritty, interwoven with several main characters, and fairly dark.

The film is a kind of revisiting of the build up to the war from one small personal point of view, filled with intrigue and international mixing. There are migrants and immigrants and a growing threat of an unnamed evil (though swastikas do appear in some inserted footage). It's complicated and exciting. Some key scenes happen early on in the 1937 Paris Exposition. It whispers and then it shouts. Most of the action is in mysterious London.

The key actor, in my view, is Serge Reggiani, who is Louis, the evil foreigner up to disrupt the uneasy peace still alive in London. He has a subtle touch to his sinister intentions, and it lifts the movie up. The actual main character is also excellent, the tortured and trapped Maria played by another Italian actor, Valentina Cortese.

It might be easy to look back at these times from more than a decade later. But it isn't easy to make it fresh, and to keep the tension make sense. Of course, now it is 60 years later and it becomes more of a drama with historical roots that have to be told by the movie, not assumed. At times the movie pulls this off with surprising sharpness. As the police get involved, it gets curiously complicated, good guys vs. bad guys, with no one quite fitting the clichés of other movies. The idea here is that the enemy is unexpected, and everywhere.

It should be mentioned that we have Audrey Hepburn, whose first movie appearance was just one year earlier. She's not quite the Audrey we all know, but almost. Briefly. Great to see.

The more I watched this movie the more I liked it. It might be an underrated gem in some ways. There is so much going on and really dramatic filming with often nearly pitch black scenes, inside or out.

A final note. A chap at one point says, surprised, "A London girl made good coffee." How times have changed.

There were such hopes invested in this film, Lindsay Anderson wrote a book about its production, but it has never really recovered from its commercial and seemingly artistic failure. In truth, for a film that aspires to be an intelligent study of anarchists beliefs, it suffers from a timidity that some may find all too typical of the British films of its period, and from punches pulled in a manner that rather typifies the work of that almost brilliant director, Thorold Dickinson. But it is an intelligent study for all that, gripping and persuasive until one too many plot convolutions spoils it. I have never failed to be moved when seeing it, nor to be frustrated that it wasn't just a little bit better. The story revolves around European refugees in London who get caught up in the activities of anarchists. Valentina Cortese gives a haunting performance as the conscience-stricken refugee caught up in an assassination plot, and a young Audrey Hepburn is her ballet-dancing innocent sister whose life she must save.