The New Guy Stirs Up Trouble

 Foreign Correspondent (1940) – A crime reporter gets the chance to go to Europe just before World War II begins.  He doesn’t know how to “play the game”, and finds paid killers on his trail.  Is peace possible?  Will he live long enough to find out?

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Starring – Joel McCrea, Lorraine Day, Herbert Marshall

Why I Liked It – An agreeable enough, lesser known movie by the great Mr. H.

This one is very much a product of its time.  War had broken out in Europe for the second time in a quarter century.  There was a huge effort to influence American opinion on the subject.  This movie is part of that attempt.  Is peace possible?  At what price?  And what about those people who have something to gain from the failure of the peace effort?  If the script feels a little preachy, it’s because it is.  Hitchcock manages to make it all palatable on the way down.

John Jones(McCrea) is a crime beat reporter for one of the big East Coast newspapers.  His only problem is that he’s bored and when he’s called into the publisher’s office, he expects to get fired.  Instead, his boss decides he’s just the kind of reporter the paper needs in Europe.  The tired, dull reports from the veteran “foreign correspondents” make him angry, and Jones is likely to shake things up.  He arrives incognito and meets the leader of the peace movement, and his lovely daughter (Day).  There’s the usual mix-ups and romantic hi-jinks in the script, which struck me as the most dated parts of the movie.  The two leads are fine, but there’s an “Aw, shucks” element to their dialogue that just falls flat 80 years later.  The action scenes make up for it, and Hitchcock keeps the story moving briskly.

Joel McCrea has never done much for me.  He’s OK at being OK, which is more than enough for a long, successful career in Hollywood.  But there’s a grittiness that this role needs that he doesn’t have.  He’s called a “poor man’s Gary Cooper”, but you’d have to be pretty poor to confuse the two.  While they both have the feel of an average guy, Cooper has that extra gear that sets the superstars apart.  He was offered the role, but turned it down. This would be a better movie with Cooper in the lead.

But after all is said and done, I got caught up in the movie.  As noted above, the cat and mouse game between reporter and assassins results in some nice action scenes.  Alfred Hitchcock knows how to combine a serious story with a little whimsy, and that makes for pleasant viewing.  The movie was popular at the time, and earned multiple Oscar nominations (including Best Movie, which it lost to another and much better Hitchcock movie “Rebecca”).  Only the director’s second movie in America, it was also a rare money loser due to the high production costs.

Not one of the classic Hitchcock movies, but an enjoyable bit of fun and adventure.

Rating – *** Worth A Look