Secret People (1951)
A British production, and very much about their view on the coming of World War II. It's gritty, interwoven with several main characters, and fairly dark.
The film is a kind of revisiting of the build up to the war from one small personal point of view, filled with intrigue and international mixing. There are migrants and immigrants and a growing threat of an unnamed evil (though swastikas do appear in some inserted footage). It's complicated and exciting. Some key scenes happen early on in the 1937 Paris Exposition. It whispers and then it shouts. Most of the action is in mysterious London.
The key actor, in my view, is Serge Reggiani, who is Louis, the evil foreigner up to disrupt the uneasy peace still alive in London. He has a subtle touch to his sinister intentions, and it lifts the movie up. The actual main character is also excellent, the tortured and trapped Maria played by another Italian actor, Valentina Cortese.
It might be easy to look back at these times from more than a decade later. But it isn't easy to make it fresh, and to keep the tension make sense. Of course, now it is 60 years later and it becomes more of a drama with historical roots that have to be told by the movie, not assumed. At times the movie pulls this off with surprising sharpness. As the police get involved, it gets curiously complicated, good guys vs. bad guys, with no one quite fitting the clichés of other movies. The idea here is that the enemy is unexpected, and everywhere.
It should be mentioned that we have Audrey Hepburn, whose first movie appearance was just one year earlier. She's not quite the Audrey we all know, but almost. Briefly. Great to see.
The more I watched this movie the more I liked it. It might be an underrated gem in some ways. There is so much going on and really dramatic filming with often nearly pitch black scenes, inside or out.
A final note. A chap at one point says, surprised, "A London girl made good coffee." How times have changed.
