Le mystère de la section 8

Vivien Leigh is beautiful and effective in her role as a spy masquerading as a Parisian dressmaker. There is requisite tension and passion in this thriller loosely-based on the real-life affair of couturiere Madeleine Cheruit and a high-ranking German officer during World War I. Another version of the story of the famous designer and her military lover is told in The Proprietor (1996)starring Jeanne Moreau.

There's not really much to this amuse-bouche of two espionage agents in Sweden during World War I. The German agent, the sophisticated and aristocratic Conrad Veidt, and the pouting delicate French agent, Vivien Leigh, are both quite good. I don't find Conrad Veidt particularly handsome but he has some properties that seem to appeal to women -- tall, polite, unspeakably rich, unflappable, and speaks with a Continental accent. He wears a monocle too, as if the rest weren't enough. I don't find him attractive but I'd like to be him.

Vivien Leigh is is a genuine stunner. There isn't a plane of her features or an angle of the camera that detracts from her beauty. She can act too. Here, she changes from curt and business-like to winsome and yearning, and she does it convincingly. Years later, as Blanche DuBois, she swooped around dressed in frills and slowly going mad in New Orleans' French Quarter. As a worn-out Southern belle, she was just as convincing. She had the misfortune of suffering for years from a disabling bipolar disorder and finally the tuberculosis that killed her.

The set design is noticeably good, even extravagant in the dining room scenes. They're enough to make any normal man's mouth water -- sitting across from a lovely woman in a fancy restaurant, drinking champagne and dreaming of Aphrodite. Yum.

The story itself left me confused. Let's see. We're most often in Stockholm during the war. There are German spies. There are French spies. There are British spies. And all of them seem to be spying on each other. It sounds practically MODERN. Vivien Leigh is a French agent. But why is she smuggling information from Paris to Sweden of all places? Why does the French spy network in Stockholm give a damn about the next German offensive. And who do they transmit it to -- French headquarters in Paris? And why does Leigh's comic janitor send secret semaphore signals out his window to someone else? When the broth is reduced, you have a tale of two lovers representing conflicting ideologies and the good one wins. "Ninotchka" did it with more flair but the intent, of course, was different. In 1937 no one in Britain was laughing much about Germany or Hitler's shenanigans.

It's in no way a bad movie. Some of the dialog is keen. In the Leigh's boutique, a dresser and a rich man's mistress have a brief exchange. Paramour: "Some men just like to buy a girl everything." Dresser: "With a girl like you, it's easy to understand why." Both the ladies giggle -- and then the mistress's grin turns into a nasty frown. Well, it loses something when it's put into print.

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.

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.

Madeleine Goddard is a spy during WWI; she is based in neutral Stockholm, where she runs a (façade) high-fashion shop with frequent contacts with Paris. All this is certain. More uncertain is her nationality (Swiss or, as seems to be stated later in the movie, French), and, above all, which country is she working for. At the beginning it's not clear, then it appears to be Germany. Then it appears not to be Germany: and, funny fact, half the User Reviews in IMDb say she works for France, half say she works for England. I will not try to settle the question: I just wanted to make clear the confusing nature of the plot.

Baron Karl von Marwitz, a German deserter, enters Sweden: he is to become the main boyfriend of Madaleine (she had another one, before, a British one, just to add to the picture!). But wait: he is not a German deserter - we learn as the movie proceeds -, but the number-one German secret service agent in Stockholm! The couple wants to escape the horrors of the war and settle in retirement in some quiet place: Madeleine suggests the French Riviera, but.. no! There he will be on enemy land. Then they agree for Lake Garda, Italy (what?! It's enemy land for him altogether!...).

The question is somewhat settled on high sea, where, together with our heroes, a German submarine, a neutral Dutch ship (that will soon raise a British flag) and some other boats meet... The movie seems to be made in earnest, and it's not bad as for visual and filmic effects: only, it is too unnecessarily complicated. A simpler treatment would have been better. My exact rating would be 5,75: six stars are the nearest approximation.