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In fact, it is my home
I don't know that I would call Stephen Fisher my favorite Hitchcock villain, but he has lingered with and troubled me for years, which makes him worth the contemplation.
On one level, he may be nothing more than a side effect of the shifting conditions of Foreign Correspondent (1940). Produced just as the phony war was turning into the real thing, the film undergoes a corresponding transformation over the course of its runtime from a pre-war light thriller in its director's own tradition to an urgent piece of up-to-the-minute propaganda as blunt as a broken fourth wall—thirty-nine steps to London after dark in two genre-jolting hours. The farther the eve of war ticks down to midnight, the more clearly the reality of Germany emerges from the Ruritanian static of Borovia, the MacGuffin of Clause 27 falls by the wayside of the headlines of September 1, 1939. As the seat-of-the-pants screwball of jungled umbrellas and prevailing windmills levels out into the cat-and-mouse of classically amateur espionage, the dialogue begins to admit the existence of blackouts and bomb shelters in London. So perhaps does Fisher clarify from an urbanely professional traitor to a deep-cover patriot, one more mask peeled off the depths to which we must recognize the enemy will keep sinking. His Universal Peace Party isn't merely a well-veneered campaign for appeasement, it's a front for strong-arm tactics as brutal as they are surreal, blasting a drugged and kidnapped man with photoflood lighting and big-band jazz. The crudity of personally arranging a murder dismays him as much as the necessity of participating in an interrogation and he sets to it as smoothly as he addresses the audiences who really believe in his conscientious objections. The warning he imparts to the American reporter unwittingly on his trail would give him away to anyone with an ear for double-speaking when he characterizes the hijackers of a prominent anti-fascist statesman as "cunning, unscrupulous—and inspired," but even his daughter who finally comes to suspect him of treason doesn't go so far as to imagine that he might never have owed his allegiance to the country they have lived in all her life. "I've just been worried," she confesses aboard the America-bound clipper they boarded narrowly ahead of the official declaration of war, "but I believed in you." Quick as if it hurts him, her father shakes his head: "You shouldn't."
A Hitchcock veteran if not a regular, Herbert Marshall had starred for the director as a conscience-stricken juror turned amateur detective in Murder! (1930) and lost none of his gentlemanly attraction over the intervening decade even as he eased out of the romance of a leading man; it puts his Fisher at first in a class with Professor Jordan of The 39 Steps (1935) or Phillip Vandamm of North by Northwest (1959), well-mannered, well-respected, well-connected men for whom the business of treason may require certain sacrifices at second hand but never compromise itself with such interference as personal feeling. Well after we've seen his duplicity in action, he remains courteous, humorous, never so controlled that he looks untouchable. His distaste for the harsher aspects of his work may be nothing more than squeamishness when he's willing to let other men bloody their hands with them. His reluctance to involve his daughter in his subversive activities does suggest more conscience than self-preservation when his right-hand man notes the additional difficulties of working around her, but even as he realizes she loves the man he's just sent off to meet with an unfortunate accident, he restrains himself from calling off the hit. Beyond the dramatic shock value and the careless-talk paranoia of wartime, it never made any sense to me that he should turn out to be ethnically German. Nothing about the mechanics of the plot would alter if Fisher were exactly what he seemed from the revelation of his perfidy, a well-bred Englishman whose Nazi sympathies have made it worth his while to promote a disingenuous pacifism while working with foreign agents to help them obtain "a piece of information that would be very valuable to the enemy in the war that breaks out tomorrow, weather permitting." All the twist adds is a dash of xenophobia and a strange complexity which there is barely time left to explore before the flying boat hits the water and the film its entreating epilogue. What I had missed was the previous war's phenomenon of spy fever as recently discussed by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
philomytha—the specter of German sleeper agents seeded throughout Britain in the most innocuous and naturalized guises which consumed not only popular literature but civilian imagination and official decisions as the country hurtled into World War I. It had not occurred to me that Foreign Correspondent could have been produced so near the outbreak of hostilities proper that it would draw more on the tropes of the older war because the newer ones had not yet been established. If it were still gearing up to the latest in propaganda, however, it would account for the otherwise curious sympathy the film extends to its not even honorable enemy with a generosity reminiscent of erstwhile war pictures as recent as Powell and Pressburger's The Spy in Black (1939) and unthinkable by the time Hitchcock returned to World War II with Saboteur (1942), whose Nazi agents really are the home-grown fifth columnists that Fisher only resembles. There's no percentage in it, nationalistically speaking. But there is a remarkable pain in the speech he makes to the daughter he loves more than anything else in his double life, the last illusions of which he is forced to disabuse her before they leave the charmed space of the air and the justice of the war-fired earth catches up to him:
"Carol, I've got to talk to you. I don't want to, but I've got to. It's the hardest part of the whole thing, talking to you now. I don't mind about the rest, really . . . I'm to be arrested when we land. As a spy. Shipped back to London. That's quite all right, except just the one phase of it—you. That's why I've got to talk to you. I should like you to think of me a little from my own point of view. It might help you, afterwards. First about yourself, my deceiving you. I had to, you know, I didn't want you involved in any part of it because you're English—half English, anyway—I'm not, I'm just coated with an English accent. It's a very thin coat. I've fought for my country in my heart in a very difficult way because sometimes it's harder to fight dishonorably than nobly in the open. And I've used my country's methods because I was born with them. I don't intend making this sort of plea to the court-martial. I'm making it only to my daughter whom I've loved dearly and before whom I feel a little ashamed."
It is not an absolution. Even allowing for how much the divers hands of the screenplay would not have known about Nazism in 1940, Fisher remains off north of the moral compass by the sheer fact that whatever he may have done to his discredit, what he's sorriest about is the hurt he's caused his daughter by getting caught. Even so, just the way his sure-footed public speaker's voice suddenly stutters, stumbles as if in spite of itself into lines like a very thin coat suggests some more troubled history of assimilation and alienation than mere loyalty of blood and soil, neither the dispassionate mastermind nor the fanatical dupe; it takes him out of archetype and into his own unanswerable and problematic self without which he could not be let out of the film heroically, for his daughter to find strength in his memory even as she agrees to the publication of his crimes. "My father fought for his country his way. It wasn't a straight way, but it was a hard way. And I've got to fight for my country—the hard way." On the other side of the war, this figure of the Nazi's daughter will become the much more compromised heroine of Notorious (1946), shape-shifting herself to make up for her father's shame. Here at its beginning, he can still be saluted as much as watched out for, the enemy who is so very like ourselves.
Because the film changed so often in production as world-historical events around it did the same, I cannot tell without research if Fisher was always intended to take the shape he did, but the net result is that for all the vivid, often dream-logical images with which Foreign Correspondent supplies its viewer, from a lethal camera-flash to a rice-paper shatter of sea, the only character who holds up comparably in my memory is George Sanders' Scott ffolliott, the amiably ambiguous co-lead who can explicate the niceties of Tudor decapitalization during a car chase, essay an improvisation in counterterrorism as if he's filing copy, and launch himself out of a hotel window into an awning full of rain with the same aplomb with which he leaves instructions to cancel his rhumba lesson, none of which protects him from fear or embarrassment or danger of his life. It fits him into the chiaroscuro, off-kilter and no joke. The weird little not so lesser light that is Foreign Correspondent would be even stronger if the same could be said of Joel McCrea's Johnny Jones or Laraine Day's Carol Fisher. Their blatantly allegorical endgame is a mutual awakening from the sidelines of their innocence in order to exchange it for a common responsibility—fighting Nazis—but however sincerely they speedrun a romance or broadcast while the bombs fall, they never really pick up the ambivalence in which their shared ally thrives as much as their poignant antagonist, the signature of their split, startling world. If it was an accident of history, so much the better. It ends up feeling like the most real thing. Perhaps I return to Fisher simply because I can't explain him, as in life he never tried to explain himself. "Thanks," he dryly acknowledges a refusal to condemn him totally, seconds from the irony of enemy action that will overturn the state of play once again. "It's a minority report, but very welcome." This coat brought to you by my hard backers at Patreon.
On one level, he may be nothing more than a side effect of the shifting conditions of Foreign Correspondent (1940). Produced just as the phony war was turning into the real thing, the film undergoes a corresponding transformation over the course of its runtime from a pre-war light thriller in its director's own tradition to an urgent piece of up-to-the-minute propaganda as blunt as a broken fourth wall—thirty-nine steps to London after dark in two genre-jolting hours. The farther the eve of war ticks down to midnight, the more clearly the reality of Germany emerges from the Ruritanian static of Borovia, the MacGuffin of Clause 27 falls by the wayside of the headlines of September 1, 1939. As the seat-of-the-pants screwball of jungled umbrellas and prevailing windmills levels out into the cat-and-mouse of classically amateur espionage, the dialogue begins to admit the existence of blackouts and bomb shelters in London. So perhaps does Fisher clarify from an urbanely professional traitor to a deep-cover patriot, one more mask peeled off the depths to which we must recognize the enemy will keep sinking. His Universal Peace Party isn't merely a well-veneered campaign for appeasement, it's a front for strong-arm tactics as brutal as they are surreal, blasting a drugged and kidnapped man with photoflood lighting and big-band jazz. The crudity of personally arranging a murder dismays him as much as the necessity of participating in an interrogation and he sets to it as smoothly as he addresses the audiences who really believe in his conscientious objections. The warning he imparts to the American reporter unwittingly on his trail would give him away to anyone with an ear for double-speaking when he characterizes the hijackers of a prominent anti-fascist statesman as "cunning, unscrupulous—and inspired," but even his daughter who finally comes to suspect him of treason doesn't go so far as to imagine that he might never have owed his allegiance to the country they have lived in all her life. "I've just been worried," she confesses aboard the America-bound clipper they boarded narrowly ahead of the official declaration of war, "but I believed in you." Quick as if it hurts him, her father shakes his head: "You shouldn't."
A Hitchcock veteran if not a regular, Herbert Marshall had starred for the director as a conscience-stricken juror turned amateur detective in Murder! (1930) and lost none of his gentlemanly attraction over the intervening decade even as he eased out of the romance of a leading man; it puts his Fisher at first in a class with Professor Jordan of The 39 Steps (1935) or Phillip Vandamm of North by Northwest (1959), well-mannered, well-respected, well-connected men for whom the business of treason may require certain sacrifices at second hand but never compromise itself with such interference as personal feeling. Well after we've seen his duplicity in action, he remains courteous, humorous, never so controlled that he looks untouchable. His distaste for the harsher aspects of his work may be nothing more than squeamishness when he's willing to let other men bloody their hands with them. His reluctance to involve his daughter in his subversive activities does suggest more conscience than self-preservation when his right-hand man notes the additional difficulties of working around her, but even as he realizes she loves the man he's just sent off to meet with an unfortunate accident, he restrains himself from calling off the hit. Beyond the dramatic shock value and the careless-talk paranoia of wartime, it never made any sense to me that he should turn out to be ethnically German. Nothing about the mechanics of the plot would alter if Fisher were exactly what he seemed from the revelation of his perfidy, a well-bred Englishman whose Nazi sympathies have made it worth his while to promote a disingenuous pacifism while working with foreign agents to help them obtain "a piece of information that would be very valuable to the enemy in the war that breaks out tomorrow, weather permitting." All the twist adds is a dash of xenophobia and a strange complexity which there is barely time left to explore before the flying boat hits the water and the film its entreating epilogue. What I had missed was the previous war's phenomenon of spy fever as recently discussed by
philomytha—the specter of German sleeper agents seeded throughout Britain in the most innocuous and naturalized guises which consumed not only popular literature but civilian imagination and official decisions as the country hurtled into World War I. It had not occurred to me that Foreign Correspondent could have been produced so near the outbreak of hostilities proper that it would draw more on the tropes of the older war because the newer ones had not yet been established. If it were still gearing up to the latest in propaganda, however, it would account for the otherwise curious sympathy the film extends to its not even honorable enemy with a generosity reminiscent of erstwhile war pictures as recent as Powell and Pressburger's The Spy in Black (1939) and unthinkable by the time Hitchcock returned to World War II with Saboteur (1942), whose Nazi agents really are the home-grown fifth columnists that Fisher only resembles. There's no percentage in it, nationalistically speaking. But there is a remarkable pain in the speech he makes to the daughter he loves more than anything else in his double life, the last illusions of which he is forced to disabuse her before they leave the charmed space of the air and the justice of the war-fired earth catches up to him:"Carol, I've got to talk to you. I don't want to, but I've got to. It's the hardest part of the whole thing, talking to you now. I don't mind about the rest, really . . . I'm to be arrested when we land. As a spy. Shipped back to London. That's quite all right, except just the one phase of it—you. That's why I've got to talk to you. I should like you to think of me a little from my own point of view. It might help you, afterwards. First about yourself, my deceiving you. I had to, you know, I didn't want you involved in any part of it because you're English—half English, anyway—I'm not, I'm just coated with an English accent. It's a very thin coat. I've fought for my country in my heart in a very difficult way because sometimes it's harder to fight dishonorably than nobly in the open. And I've used my country's methods because I was born with them. I don't intend making this sort of plea to the court-martial. I'm making it only to my daughter whom I've loved dearly and before whom I feel a little ashamed."
It is not an absolution. Even allowing for how much the divers hands of the screenplay would not have known about Nazism in 1940, Fisher remains off north of the moral compass by the sheer fact that whatever he may have done to his discredit, what he's sorriest about is the hurt he's caused his daughter by getting caught. Even so, just the way his sure-footed public speaker's voice suddenly stutters, stumbles as if in spite of itself into lines like a very thin coat suggests some more troubled history of assimilation and alienation than mere loyalty of blood and soil, neither the dispassionate mastermind nor the fanatical dupe; it takes him out of archetype and into his own unanswerable and problematic self without which he could not be let out of the film heroically, for his daughter to find strength in his memory even as she agrees to the publication of his crimes. "My father fought for his country his way. It wasn't a straight way, but it was a hard way. And I've got to fight for my country—the hard way." On the other side of the war, this figure of the Nazi's daughter will become the much more compromised heroine of Notorious (1946), shape-shifting herself to make up for her father's shame. Here at its beginning, he can still be saluted as much as watched out for, the enemy who is so very like ourselves.
Because the film changed so often in production as world-historical events around it did the same, I cannot tell without research if Fisher was always intended to take the shape he did, but the net result is that for all the vivid, often dream-logical images with which Foreign Correspondent supplies its viewer, from a lethal camera-flash to a rice-paper shatter of sea, the only character who holds up comparably in my memory is George Sanders' Scott ffolliott, the amiably ambiguous co-lead who can explicate the niceties of Tudor decapitalization during a car chase, essay an improvisation in counterterrorism as if he's filing copy, and launch himself out of a hotel window into an awning full of rain with the same aplomb with which he leaves instructions to cancel his rhumba lesson, none of which protects him from fear or embarrassment or danger of his life. It fits him into the chiaroscuro, off-kilter and no joke. The weird little not so lesser light that is Foreign Correspondent would be even stronger if the same could be said of Joel McCrea's Johnny Jones or Laraine Day's Carol Fisher. Their blatantly allegorical endgame is a mutual awakening from the sidelines of their innocence in order to exchange it for a common responsibility—fighting Nazis—but however sincerely they speedrun a romance or broadcast while the bombs fall, they never really pick up the ambivalence in which their shared ally thrives as much as their poignant antagonist, the signature of their split, startling world. If it was an accident of history, so much the better. It ends up feeling like the most real thing. Perhaps I return to Fisher simply because I can't explain him, as in life he never tried to explain himself. "Thanks," he dryly acknowledges a refusal to condemn him totally, seconds from the irony of enemy action that will overturn the state of play once again. "It's a minority report, but very welcome." This coat brought to you by my hard backers at Patreon.
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I thought of Fisher as soon as I read
(And still very interesting to me that W.E. Johns doesn't seem to have done this particular trope in this way, although he's hardly innocent of some others.)
Especially in light of those others, I think it's fine that this particular bullet comes pre-dodged!
[edit] I meant to ask, but was extremely tired: are there analogous tropes in Johns' work, or really just nothing similar?
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This week has been a Week, just now coming back to this ...
It kind of depends on how broadly you want to spread the net. He's certainly got plenty of racist tropes in his work (untrustworthy Asians and lazy POC are two of the worst, as well as a cringey - if pulp-compliant - tendency to write a lot of characters' dialogue in dialect; there are a few characters who would actually be fine if you didn't have to endure the racist dialect speech, and some that are completely unsalvageable). I think the thing that keeps me coming back to his books and generally feeling kindly disposed towards him as an author - even if he may not deserve this amount of slack - is a sort of a broad sense that he genuinely likes people, wants to think the best of people, and the ones he writes terribly are the ones he hasn't met in person and is essentially writing as a broad set of racist stereotypes. There are some areas where he improves noticeably (presumably he met some members of whatever group in the meantime), some where it's a toss-up what you're going to get (there are some books with wincingly racist stereotype Asian characters and yet one of his earliest Asian characters is a perfectly fine not-at-all-stereotypical side character who speaks fluent English; there's one book that drops a blazingly racist incident in the middle when everything is fine with the exact same ethnic group on either side, like he was suddenly possessed by the ghost of HP Lovecraft for a few pages there), and some areas where he's actually fine from the beginning, and immigrants in general seem to be one of those.
It's always possible there are some in the books I haven't read, or some more subtle stereotyping I didn't pick up on, though.
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I appreciate your coming back to it! Condolences on your week?
(there are some books with wincingly racist stereotype Asian characters and yet one of his earliest Asian characters is a perfectly fine not-at-all-stereotypical side character who speaks fluent English; there's one book that drops a blazingly racist incident in the middle when everything is fine with the exact same ethnic group on either side, like he was suddenly possessed by the ghost of HP Lovecraft for a few pages there)
I saw something like that in the work of John Russell, who wrote a lot of short stories (mostly in the 1920's, mostly set in the South Pacific) which could be classified as colonial adventures and were completely unpredictable as to their degree of racism, which could fall anywhere on the spectrum from story-killing to actively argued with and did not seem to map to any kind of hierarchy of sympathy that I could identify; I finally decided that when he wrote non-white characters as protagonists or perspective characters, they became people for him, and when they were part of the local color of the adventure, he was much more likely to fall back on stereotypes. So your feeling that Johns was interested in people even if he did not always render them accurately makes sense to me. It is interesting to me that he never seems to have had any kind of problem with immigrants as a group, but these days frankly that's refreshing.
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What you say about the film needing to use the tropes of the last war because the present one hadn't yet developed its own makes me muse on a time before we had the complete catalogue of The Nazi. When instead of being the thing to which all subsequent evils would be compared and contrasted, Nazism itself must have been compared and contrasted with other evils.
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Yes, this is a fascinating phenomenon.
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I was trying to think about Foreign Correspondent in terms of age-mates I have seen and the only conclusion I could come to was that they are all over the place. Pen Tennyson's Convoy nominally includes some Jewish refugees, but in terms of romance and naval maneuvers could as easily take place during the Atlantic U-boat campaign of World War I; the Deutschland shows up to raise the stakes in the third act and could have been a battlecruiser without detriment to the plot. Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich explicitly names its Nazis as such—Paul Henreid is a Gestapo agent, Rex Harrison passes himself off as an officer of the Wehrmacht—but they are generally such suckers for a good Heil and a monocle that the film might hold up better if it had used Ruritanian stand-ins. Powell and Pressburger's Contraband is set expressly during the phony war and has the structure of a Hitchcockian light thriller, but its political bona fides come through in the real-life relevance of the MacGuffin and even some of the jokes like setting the climax in a warehouse of plaster Neville Chamberlains; its Nazis are not just the most topical flavor of bad guys. By 1941, you are starting to see stuff like Pimpernel Smith and 49th Parallel where the kind of threat the Nazis pose matters as much as the fact of the threat itself. I realize this is a catalogue of British movies, but the American film industry was with few and notable exceptions like Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) not on the same page.
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That's a lot of what I keep thinking about Fisher, how he exists as a function of propaganda and seems to have turned with the rest of the film into something else by the end. Which I am not actually complaining about, I just can't tell if it was a planned effect. Hitchcock had a penchant for perversely sympathetic villains—or perversely putting audiences in sympathy with them—but then again Fisher seems overall so much a part of the shape-changing atmosphere that I'm not convinced that accounts for it entirely. I would like to read the various stages of the script for this film for a lot of reasons, but however Fisher was originally conceived is one of them.
What you say about the film needing to use the tropes of the last war because the present one hadn't yet developed its own makes me muse on a time before we had the complete catalogue of The Nazi.
I have not made any kind of survey of the subject and frankly right now I wouldn't undertake one, but the variable closeness of screen Nazis to reality is definitely something I have thought about over the years. It still feels monumental, not trite, to hear Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) point-blank telling Clive Wynne-Candy that this war isn't like the last war: this enemy isn't like the last enemy. Pressburger knew.
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It could have been more on the order of smallpox and we'd all have been fine.
(Which is one of the other aspects of Fisher, obviously: he was much more theoretical when I discovered his film in 2010. He is still about as theoretical a Nazi as it is possible to find in a WWII-era film in that he voices none of the ideologies, even to justify his efforts on behalf of his native country once it's been revealed as such. It goes along with his daughter being able to eulogize him, the audience feel that he has done the right rather than merely the expedient thing in sacrificing himself to save her; it's part of the older pattern. It's just that he's still an agent of the German government and in 1940 that doesn't leave a lot of choice of political affiliation. It may be sharper for viewers in 2024 than at the time of the film's release.)
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It feels like a sharp lesson in how different a country the past can be without being all that much past.
(Travelling from Britain to France in April 1940 is possible on grounds of health)
Also distances being buck wild.
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This is explicitly an artefact of the last war, and what the protagonist bases his assumptions on.
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[says Mac to Editor Hestia]
My first reaction to the level of Nazi in this picture was Monty Python: "It's only a wafer-thin one!"
How interesting, as other commenters have said better, to be still counting on the pegs of the last war to hold up a story of the current one.
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I have transmitted his message! She responded with a direct gold look and an intranscribable mew.
My first reaction to the level of Nazi in this picture was Monty Python: "It's only a wafer-thin one!"
Including the part where everything still goes boom!
How interesting, as other commenters have said better, to be still counting on the pegs of the last war to hold up a story of the current one.
It really fascinates me, like seeing a hinge in motion. The exact historical moment Fisher exists in is the only one he ever could have.