Traitor Spy

You never see or understand what this is all about. Some secret documents are copied that you never see or hear what they are about - some secret weapon, it seems, concerning some secret U-boat or something. If you can't follow the plot, which probably nobody can, just relax and sit back and at least enjoy the great night club scene with many lovely ladies both entertaining and performing exotic dances. The music is just for effects. Hitchcock used to make films like this in England, but they at least had a story to tell and could be identified, but all that Hitchcock clarity is missing here, getting drowned in different confusions, now and then someone killing someone and getting killed. The finale with a great fire consuming the entire set-up is dramatic indeed, and for once there is no happy end, as the lovers don't get away and least of all with the £4000 they tried to get for their trouble. Those invaluable documents that everyone was so awfully greedy about never turn up and never land anywhere - we shall never understand what they were all about.

I admit I was in a sour mood when I sat down to watch this movie, but I don't think that affected my opinion. It's a murky, overly complicated film in which various detectives/spies, including suave Romily Lunge and beautiful Tamara Desni are trying to solve a complicated mystery around what they are calling "the Torso Murder." It all starts when Bruce Cabot steals.... well, he steals the Maguffin, really. The Germans want it, the British want it back, but it's still the Maguffin and only the fact that the movie was released during the War meant it wasn't intended for catching tigers in the Scottish Highlands. There are some scenes that strain credulity, like the way that everyone shows up, entirely by coincidence so far as I can tell, at the same tiny night club, which offers a very dramatic confrontation.

In the end, the story switches gears several times, so that what story the film makers wanted to tell, what conclusion they wished to offer, remains murky. The movie viewer may know what happened, but the people in the film themselves may still be looking for the Maguffin.