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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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.