FILM CLUB - The Spy In Black - Contraband

Powell & Pressburger Season
Powell and Pressburger launched their movie partnership during the war. Brought  together by Alexander Korda in 1939. They went on to make eight wartime themed movies finishing with A Matter of Life & Death in 1946. Their wartime films took on the tricky task of producing intelligent impactful films that both were and were not wartime propaganda. What links them visually as movies is the boundaries between black and white are frequently dramatically sharp. Figures often emerging in or out of theatrical shadows into patchy shafts of light. A metaphor perhaps for the fascist menace then darkening European liberty.

The Spy In Black - 1939

Its WW1 and 1917, a German U boat is sent on a special mission to Scapa Flow to blow up some of the British fleet. They are lead by charmingly debonair Captain Hardt ( Conrad Veidt ) He is to rendezvous with a German spy who is doubling as a teacher on the island - Anne Burnett ( Valerie Hobson). A tightly written script keeps you in the dark about what is really going on, with lots of double bluffs going on. It daringly shows you most of the operation entirely from the German point of view. Made at the beginning of the WW2, The Spy in Black cleverly echoes an incident at the end of the last war, everyone at the time would know of. The entire German High Seas Fleet having been scuttled at Scapa Flow in June 1919. It also features the first appearance in a Powell & Pressburger film of Marius Goring.

Contraband -1940

With the success of The Spy in Black, Powell and Pressburg's next film stuck with the same central actors, Veidt and Hobson. Whereas the romantic inclination had been hinted at in its predecessor, here it is allowed to fully blossom. The only thing standing in its way is that Conrad Veidt is far too old to play the dashing romantic lead. Also there is zero chemistry between them. Veidt's accent is so clearly German, that him pretending to be Danish stretches credibility. There is a theatrical stageiness about these early P & P films, formed around a particular dramatically structured format. There are early indications though of their future films, in the diversity of types of voices you hear. You get a broader picture painted of wartime London through the fleeting presence of noticeably working class characters.

Contraband pivots around the character of Captain Anderson (Conrad Veidt), in charge of a boat crossing the Atlantic. Carrying both passengers and cargo. Acting on a tip off the Royal Navy intercept to check it for contraband. Pulled into dock while the manifest is checked, two passes are issued so the Captain and his second in command can go onshore. These passes get stolen by two passengers, one of whomever is Mrs Sorenson (Valerie Hobson). The Captain sets off in pursuit of them, becoming embroiled in espionage and Nazi sympathisers in the UK. 

Of their early wartime films this is probably the weakest, with a clunky storyline that never quite convinces. Nonetheless Powell & Pressburger are beginning to establish a production team of people they will work with repeatedly, here they use the superb cinematographer Freddie Young for the first time.