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"Uneasy neutrals" and shifting alliances, Turkey at wartime mined not for irony (Mankiewicz's 5 Fingers) but for speed and paranoia. The Nazi officer (Sydney Greenstreet) aims for "a masterpiece of creating a political crisis" à la the Reichstag fire, fake plans of a Russian invasion to unsettle the Non-Aggression Pact, "I will accomplish what even Bismarck could not." The enigmatic dame (Osa Massen) aboard the Baghdad-Istanbul Express turns up dead in an Ankara hotel, the MacGuffin falls on the lap of Joe from Brooklyn (George Raft). From The 39 Steps to Foreign Correspondent, then, a tangle of spies that includes Peter Lorre perpetually whining for vodka. "A wild ride on a Turkish merry-go-round." Brisk chunk of international skullduggery, Raoul Walsh tearing through the smoky Middle East of the Warner Bros. backlot. Ahead of Reed's The Third Man, "the Street of One Thousand and One Plots." The traveling American promptly hits on a fellow passenger, puts the bubblegum in his pocket to good use, turns the cudgel back on his torturers. In a twisting street corner, a hand with a pistol out of the shadows. "That is one language I do understand." Nightclub views, odalisque and all, the melee that starts out among dining tables continues in the kitchen with a cleaver-wielding cook. Foster's Journey into Fear is concurrent, also from Eric Ambler. "A curious touch of the grotesque. Dead man on the floor. A condemned one sitting before me. And a Strauss waltz as the funeral march. What could be more entertaining?" The climax reconfigures The Maltese Falcon with Lorre in the gunsel role, the ferocious car chase is a Walsh signature. Godard in Breathless remembers the punchline, "we are going to cement Russian-American relations." With Brenda Marshall, Turhan Bey, Willard Robertson, Kurt Katch, and Daniel Ocko. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |