Foreign Correspondent

This is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier movies before his career took off. A New York newspaper reporter, Johnny Jones, is assigned the position of a foreign correspondent in Europe to cover a peace treaty to prevent World War 2. His first task is to interview a diplomat Van Meer, who was leading the peace talks, at a luncheon for diplomats. Jones falls for a girl, Carol Fisher, during the luncheon. Before the meeting can happen, Van Meer is assassinated in front of Jones. He chases off after the assassin in a car chase with Carol and another reporter. The story takes off from there.

‘Foreign Correspondent’ was one of the few Hitchcock films nominated for an Oscar. Interestingly, another one of his films, ‘Rebecca’, was also nominated that same year and won the Oscar for best picture (one of my favorite movies). I don’t believe ‘Foreign Correspondent’ belongs in the same sentence as ‘Rebecca’ or most of Hitchcock’s best works that came later, but it’s still interesting to watch. It had good visuals, cinematography, and camera work. Hitchcock completed the filming just months before Germany started bombarding London. Hitchcock was visiting England at the time, and war looked imminent. He returned to America a week before the bombing and added a new ending scene before release.

Would I recommend this? Not until you have watched Hitchcock’s best movies. I don’t think this was one of his top 10 movies. After watching most of his best films, I believe Hitchcock ages like fine wine, improving the suspense presentation, cinematography, camera work, and storytelling in later works.

Really liked the movie. I liked the Patriotism. Pretty cool that Alfred Hitchcock had two movies up for the Oscar at the same time. The other one was Rebecca.

All of Hitchcock’s films contain a mix of genre so it’s interesting to see what he makes out of a political thriller mystery with a romantic subplot, something completely unlike anything else he would become known for. The film is tense and dramatic as needed but spends long amounts of time in a comedic gear, with McCrea getting to fire off Grantesque screwball delivery. Laraine Day is waaaay too young to be his love interest but at least she’s written as intelligent and with some amount of agency.

Would make an interesting double feature with The Great Dictator, released just two months later.