Jornada Sinistra

Cinema uber villain Conrad Veidt and delicate Vivien Leigh make for an odd but absorbing couple as spies on opposite sides in this suspense romance. Veidt's nefarious allure and usual commitment to cruelty is tempered long enough to get the attention of Miss Leigh and it gives the somewhat convoluted (she's a double agent) story a suspense that sustains itself up until the final moments.

Madeline Goddard (Leigh) poses as a Stockholm dress shop owner while spying for Germany in neutral Sweden. Baron Karl Von Marwitz (Veidt) arrives in Stockholm to put the war behind him and live an epicurean existence of wine women and song. He also is merely posing. Goddard and Marwitz eventually become entangled and the passion between the two distracts them momentarily from their assignments which is to expose each other.

Veidt and Leigh have some excellent scenes together fraught with suspense and romance as they parry back and forth using charm and suspicion for weapons. In spite of their contrasting stature they display a nice change of pace chemistry with director Victor Seville maintaining a degree of ambiguity with both leads late into the film as they struggle with duty and desire.

There's a rousing gun battle between a sub and disguised transport in the finale with a somewhat schmaltzy climax that hinders the film, but Veidt and Leigh create enough fireworks of their own to make Desperate Journey worth the watch.

I am always ready to make allowances for old films. Unlike others, I understand that they cannot possibly equal modern films. A film made in 1937 - what's that? 86 years ago? - cannot remotely be the same as modern films. The acting, the techincal aspects, the mindset, what was considered proper and what not, acceptable or not. That's why I have no patience with people who bleat, "it's dated ... un-pc ..." And my favorite, "It's unsuitable for our modern sensitivites." i.e. It's not woke or PC. LOL. Of course it isn't, Einstein. It was made 40, 50 - 80 years ago.

This film, while not necessarily entrancing, is not bad. You might even love it if you like oldies. There is only one thing that I found annoying and distracting. The story is supposed to happen in 1918 ... but everybody, especially the women, is dressed in glaringly 1930s fashion. Even the makeup and the haristyles. They don't even pretend to make it look like 1918. That never fails to annoy me. And the same thing happens in modern films, make no mistake. I've seen contemporary films that are allegedly set in 1960 but you'd never know it judging by the fashion. There IS something called research, you know.

I must admit that I cannot see Conrad Veldt as a romantic figure. Maybe I'm too influenced by Casablanca, I don't know. My bad, of course.

Still and all, I'd much rather watch an oldie like this one, with all its shortcomings, than the garbage Hollyweird relentlessly vomits these days. I mean, if you want to see anachronism on a grotesque level, watch any of the "period" pieces they slosh on us these days. At best you'll get a good laugh.

Vivien Leigh is even better in this film than she was in GONE WITH THE WIND. She has a fragile, hunted beauty which works perfectly for her role as the unwilling spy forced into romantic entanglements and deceptions. The story is murky, but that doesn't really matter. Watch the sequence where Vivien has been marched aboard ship and locked into her stateroom for deportment as an unwanted spy. Using just her eyes and her expression, Vivien does an entire scene of tossing in her sleep, going to the porthole, and lying back down to sleep again, showing every emotion from fear, suspicion, and doubt to acceptance of her own guilt. Then there's an explosion and she sits bolt upright, looking as fragile and unspeakably lovely as a hunted deer. This is a movie where the sheer radiance of the lead actress makes everything else seem dull by comparison.

One of the first reviews I ever did for IMDb was of The Firefly, the 1937 MGM musical that starred Allan Jones and Jeanette MacDonald. The original book of the Broadway operetta was scrapped for a plot involving espionage agents working for the exiled King of Spain and for Napoleon and they were played by MacDonald and Jones respectively.

It seems as though I may have discovered where the story came from as Dark Journey is in fact based on a couple of real life French and German agents operating during World War I. Both are stationed in neutral Stockholm and serve as conduits for intelligence for their respective governments.

Like in The Firefly both fall for each other and in the end the female uses all her feminine charms to trap the male as the British use a Trojan horse gambit as well as Vivien Leigh's considerable charms to nail Conrad Veidt. What do they do, you have to watch Dark Journey for that, but I have to say it is rather clever.

Dark Journey and Fire Over England with her then husband Laurence Olivier are the films that got Vivien Leigh her first real critical notice. Ultimately in her career which in point of fact has very few films to her credit, it led to double Academy Awards for Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. Her beauty is stunning in Dark Journey and no hint of the physical and mental problems that plagued her tragically all her adult life.

Conrad Veidt who escaped Nazi Germany was also making quite a mark in the British cinema. His career role there would be Jaffa in The Thief of Bagdad and later on of course as Major Stroesser in Casablanca in the USA. He made a good living playing a lot of Nazis during World War II although he was as rabidly anti-Nazi as they come. He left Germany because he had a Jewish wife. He died way too young and never saw the ultimate triumph against Hitler.

If any of you have seen The Firefly you know exactly what happens to both Leigh and Veidt. You could do a lot worse than seeing both of them back to back.

I watched this movie late late late one night and it really caught me off guard. I missed the opening credits and at first thought it was some early Hitchcock movie that for some reason I had never heard of. It has some Hitchcock-esque bits from the snappy dialogue in tense situations, a rich supporting cast, bits in a music hall etc but of course it's not Hitchcock. It's Vivien Leigh, who is massively hot as usual, playing a double spy and falling in love with some creepy German guy. I kept expecting a vaguely handsome, stalwart American hero type to nab her but she actually fell for the German, who was ostensibly a bad guy. I guess 3 years later it would have been impossible to make this film but in 1937 it was ok.

As I said, great supporting cast, solid turn by the leads, nice script and tight directing. unfortunately the love story is not as well rendered as it could have been (their exchanges are a bit too arch for my taste), the suspense never really builds to a crescendo and the effects in the end naval engagement certainly do not hold up well but overall it's still a pretty good film.