Foreign Correspondent

1940 was a big yvar for Alfred Hiitchcock. He made his firrst American film, Rebecca, which won a Best Picture Oscar, and in the same year his second American film, Foreign Corresondent, was also released, and also nominated for Best Picture.

Foreign Correspondent is an espionage thriller that has a fair share of humor, largely due to the performance of Joel McCrae as a reporter traveling to Europe before the breakout of World War II. He meets a diplomat, Albert Basserman, who is circumspect about the war's likelihood. Later, McRae will be in Holland, and meet Basserman again, but the old man doesn't recognize him. In one of Hitchcock's signature shots, Basserman is assassinated amidst a sea of umbrellas. McRae gives chase to the killer, and hops in the car of another reporter (George Sanders) and the daughter of the head of a peace organization (Laraine Day). They track him to a field of windmills.

McRae notices that one of the windmills is turning against the wind, so he takes a look inside and finds some spies. Then, to his astonishment, he finds Basserman still alive. It was a double that was killed.

McRae, Day, and Sanders team to find Basserman after McRae, outnumbered, flees the windmill. Then we learn that Day's father, Herbert Marshall, is actually a spy for the enemy (Germany is hardly mentioned, but it's interesting that McRae mentions Hitler, as before the entry into the war, American films bent over backward not to offend Germany).

Marshall hires a hitman to take out McRae (Edmund Gwenn) who tries to push McRae off the top of a cathedral but only succeeds in falling to his own death. McRae and Day fall in love and want to get married, which is not convincing, but a romantic angle was a must back then, even today. The film ends with a spectacular airplane crash, with pretty good special effects for 1940.

I would place Foreigrn Correspondent as second tier Hitchcock, below his great films but still pretty good. The film is very patriotic, dedicated to foreign correspondents, who were heroes during the war (Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow among them), a shift from today's attitude about the press, when our current administration has labeled the press as an enemy to the people.