Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
American crime reporter John Jones is reassigned to Europe as a foreign correspondent to cover the imminent war. When he walks into the middle of an assassination and stumbles on a spy ring, he seeks help from a beautiful politician’s daughter and an urbane English journalist to uncover the truth.
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It reminded me of Laraine Day's castrating laughter over Joel McCrea losing his hat in Foreign Correspondent , which is neither here nor there but underscores the idea that if there is something to be said about male fragility, it's likely that Hitchcock said it already.
It’s a sly nod to a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent.”
There’s a gorgeous homage to Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent”: an aerial image of a blond head in the midst of a sea of black umbrellas.
The action sequences recall everything from Carol Reed 's "Night Train to Munich," in scenes involving derring-do in the Alps, to Alfred Hitchcock 's "Foreign Correspondent," as in the climactic air battle pitting America Himself against the Red Skull high over the Atlantic.
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He is taunting Ethan, who is also bound (but not gagged) in the same room, threatening to kill her if Ethan doesn’t tell him how he can put his hands on a fearsome instrument of terror known as the “rabbit’s foot,” this movie’s equivalent of the by now overly familiar MacGuffin—though no one in any of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies ever actually used that term to describe, for example, the secret clause of a treaty in Foreign Correspondent (1940), or the plans for new weapons in The 39 Steps (1935) and North by Northwest (1959), or the nuclear materials in Notorious (1946).
There is a sequence in the Hitchcock classic Foreign Correspondent when Joel McCrea and his comrades, in a car pursuing another car bearing a man who just carried out a very public assassination in the city they’ve left behind, round a curve and see … an empty road and miles of windmills (it’s Holland).
This last extended chase sequence reminds us of two Hitchcock strategies: His juxtaposition of patriotic images and espionage, as in "North by Northwest" and "Saboteur," and his desperate chases through uncaring crowds, reminders of "Foreign Correspondent" and " Strangers on a Train ."
Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”
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Which gets his family shot at and, in one scene right out of Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent,” dodging a mysterious man wielding an umbrella during a heavy downpour.
In a movie that for the most part is pretty grim, Scorsese's occasional Hitchcock flourishes — the rear-projection backgrounds in some of the outdoor scenes, the lighthouse looming up like the windmill in "Foreign Correspondent" — provide welcome amusement.