Secret Agent

By 1936 Hitchcock was really starting to find his feet. After a series of projects that ignited his flair for tension, thrills and fiendish plots (Murder!, Number 17 and The Man Who Knew Too Much) and some films that pushed the limits of his interest and range as a director (The Skin Game, Rich and Strange and Waltzes From Vienna), Hitchcock truly hit his stride with the superb film The 39 Steps, considered by many to be his finest pre-Hollywood film. Fresh off this success he launched straight into another tale of espionage and wrong turns, Secret Agent, a tight Eurocentric spy caper with a dark sense of humour and scene-stealing turn from Peter Lorre. From here on in Hitchcock would make spy thrillers his forte.

Ashendon (John Gielguld) is a British subject who is handpicked by the government to head up a secret mission in WW1. His Majesty's government declares Gielguld's character as dead and gives him a new idenity before sending him off to Switzerland with a fake wife (Madeleine Carroll) and a sketchy weirdo known only as the General (Peter Lorre). Together the trio are to kill a German spy, but once they get to the Swiss Alps and pinpoint their target the mission goes a bit pear shaped.

The suspense and twists aren't as accomplished as you might expect... his previous film The 39 Steps is just about near-perfect, but even with that homerun behind him Hitchcock is still very much keen to wildly experiment with his storytelling techniques. And, to be fair, he kept doing this for most of his career - often with amazing results - but here he sacrifices the bigger picture in exchange for some neat set pieces and turnabouts. Secret Agent moves at a quick enough pace and never fails to keep the viewer's interest, but there's a wholeness that's missing from the overall film - he's still perfecting the formula. On the positive side, Hitchcock's dark sense of humour begins to emerge throughout this film, and there are more than a few little touches that shine through.

I think one of the film's major problems is that John Gielguld doesn't really make for a very engaging action man. He's far too lofty, detached and prissy for this kind of role... Hitchcock craftily sold it to the actor by comparing it to Hamlet but you can tell that Gielguld isn't really into it. Peter Lorre on the other hand threatens to capsize the whole production with his flambouyant performance, playing one of the most bizarre-looking ruthless assassins in cinematic history (his character looks like a Mexican curly-haired pirate), but he's such a fun performer that you can't really begrudge him anything. The rest of the cast is the kind of Hitchcockian mix of the heroic and the eccentric that would colour later films like The Lady Vanishes and Lifeboat so effectively. Secret Agent isn't one of the director's best films but it will be of high interest to any fans who are keen to see the young master sinking his teeth into the genre that would become his canvas for the majority of his career.

DIRECTOR: Alfred Hitchcock
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Charles Bennett and Alma Reville, based on some short stories by W. Somerset Maugham.
KEY ACTORS: John Gielguld, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young, Percy Marmont, Florence Kahn, Lilli Palmer

RELATED TEXTS:
- Based on two short stories from a novel called Ashendon: Or The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham.
- There are more than thirty films based on the various works of W. Somerset Maugham.
- Hitchcock's next film, Sabotage, was actually based on a novel called The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Confusing, huh?
- Peter Lorre previously appeared in Hitchcock's original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.