I suppose you're not Mr. Pigeon

Film that blew my mind tonight: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Contraband (1940), with Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson. I am grateful to samhenderson for telling me it's available from Kino, because otherwise I would have despaired of humanity.

Veidt and Hobson had starred together the previous year in The Spy in Black (1939), the film on which Powell and Pressburger met; it was a neat little World War I espionage flick, with Veidt as a U-boat captain come ashore in the Orkneys to lead a raid on Scapa Flow and Hobson as his apparent contact, a cool schoolmistress with more layers than he's prepared for, maddeningly attractive to him because of her ice-nerve professionalism, not in spite of it. Their chemistry is terrific; it's almost not possible to believe the sudden revelation that she's the wife of the supposedly disgraced and turncoat naval officer who's been feeding Veidt information about the disposition of the British fleet and that she was dragooned at the last minute into her role of double agent, because she seems so much more in her element with a small pistol in her hand and nothing to be read in her eyes at all. Powell and Pressburger must have noticed, because they wrote her and Veidt even better parts in Contraband and a script that took full advantage of the live-wire tension between the two—I wasn't expecting the bondage. Or the rugby scrum in the nightclub. He's the captain of a Danish merchant vessel detained in British port for cargo inspection; she's the disobedient divorcée who refuses to wear a life jacket, then steals his landing passes and disappears with a male passenger no one even thought she knew. Angrily pursuing Mrs. Sorensen—or maybe she's Miss Clayton—ashore, Andersen finds himself in blacked-out London in the middle of what he initially takes for feminine thrill-seeking, except it turns out that Sorensen's thrills are the SOE kind, with their initial adversarial spark flashing rapidly into something that could get them both killed at any moment and they wouldn't have it any other way. It's marvelous. It is relevant that she has a mental map of London's streets; it is relevant that he can steer by the stars. He left the Danish Royal Navy and took up the tramp trade because there was no adventure in sailing back and forth across the North Sea; she's identified by the Gestapo agent she faced once in Düsseldorf as the most dangerous kind of spy, the kind that doesn't do it for money, but for love and adrenaline. "I've had enough trouble because of you," Andersen says at the film's close; and then, with relish, "And I feel I shall have more." It is as disorderly and satisfying as the close of a screwball comedy, the most adult and transgressive of the romance genres. (And it is a small thing from a modern standpoint that half the time Sorensen¹ pays for things like cab fare and dinner and the other half of the time Andersen picks up the tab, but in late 1939, it's striking.)

It is simply a fact that Conrad Veidt is sexy: I am so glad someone finally noticed and wrote him an unequivocal romantic lead in English, and I am not surprised it was Emeric Pressburger.² I don't understand why Valerie Hobson seems to be remembered primarily for Great Expectations (1946),³ because this film is incontrovertible proof that David Lean screwed it up: I have never found Hobson as the adult Estella as convincing as the teenage Jean Simmons, but now that I know she was capable of generating a brain-destroying sexual charge, I don't have anyone to fault for it but the director. The cinematography is crisp black-and-white, sometimes documentary and often noir and occasionally, playfully, expressionist; the political in-jokes are perfectly timed. In short, I have no idea why this film is apparently obscure; it seems to keep getting classified as Hitchcock-lite and this is incomprehensible to me, especially since it's much more serious about the war than its closest comparisons, The Lady Vanishes (1938) or Foreign Correspondent (1940). It has more conventional Nazis than anything else I've seen by the Archers, but it also has more kink and genderbending, so I'll take the trade?

I should go to bed. None of our trees have blown over yet. Peter Cushing must be working.

1. I keep calling her this because while it's unlikely to be her real name, we never find out what that might be.

2. From the shooting script for The Spy in Black: "Certainly [Fräulein Tiel] must be feeling something, but she has herself under control, that is as much under control as it is possible for a young lady to be, who is alone with Conrad Veidt at midnight."

3. And for marrying John Profumo, which I didn't know until last week.

A high tide coming will eat the land

1. Have a brief mix of storm-songs, even if it mostly rained here.

( Who can turn skies back and begin again? )

2. I Cefalopodi! —Not a Lovecraftian commedia troupe, but Adolf Naef's monograph for Fauna und Flora des Golfes von Neapel und der Angrenzenden Meers-Abschitte (1921–23). Which is still cool.

3. Kim Newman on mad movie plastic surgeons. I thought at once of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944); the in-joke of Peter Lorre's Dr. Einstein drunkenly creating a literal, Universal-looking Frankenstein's monster is even cleverer than I thought.

4. Three songs by Marianne Faithfull, filmed by Derek Jarman (1979): "Broken English."

5. I really like that there's an entire website devoted to Esmond Knight.