Foreign Correspondent
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Year Released: 1940
Rating: 3.5
Takes a little bit to get started - the first twenty minutes drag by - but once a key figure is assassinated and the plot becomes clear Hitchcock is in excellent form. Indeed, it contains a lot of Hitch's recurring themes: the man with an alternate identity (Joel McCrea has to change his name for his boss), international intrigue, the father-figure concealing information and, of course, a MacGuffin. Truffaut, for some reason, referred to this as a "B" picture, and Hitch agreed with him - to me, it's an "A" picture, with expert art direction by Menzies, camerawork by Rudolph Mate and a pretty good lead performance by McCrea. Laraine Day's acting is bad, but she's mostly a secondary figure.
