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It opens in a sanitarium, cf. Lang's Ministry of Fear, security bumblers in a thunderstorm establish the jocular tone: "A maniac broke out on us." "I don't blame him, he probably didn't like your manners." The fugitive is soon a stabbed corpse in a hotel room, the doctor he kidnapped (Richard Carlson) is the main suspect and the fly in the ointment of an espionage operation. "Brother, you got a shock coming to you. In fact, just around twenty thousand volts." The sketch artist (Nancy Kelly) tags along at gunpoint, torn nightgown under the trench coat. Leap from moving car onto carrier truck, smoldering cigarette in the back seat during a police roadblock, reverse down the ramp and onto the highway. "For someone who's innocent, you certainly have a natural flair for felony." Robert Siodmak's understanding of Hitchcock as suspense shading into screwball propels this variant of The 39 Steps, with the added wrinkle of Albert Bassermann on the other side of the Foreign Correspondent situation. Posing as an eloping couple, the protagonists are brought to the judge by a pair of Keystone Cops for an impromptu wedding, they're sent to the honeymoon suite and hubby comes down sans pants to ask for thread and needle—a passage right out of Sturges. "So strange and unreal," the adventure even includes patriotic undies, "the cutest little embroidered V, for Victory." Back to the sanitarium for the climactic unveiling of the MacGuffin in a screenful of blinding smoke, the upshot is that you'd have to be mad to go nuclear. With Miles Mander, Edward Gargan, Adrian Morris, Martin Kosleck, Walter Kingsford, Nestor Paiva, Oscar O'Shea, Mary Gordon, Cy Kendall, Arthur Loft, Marion Martin, and Clem Bevans. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |