2015 Top Ten List # 3 Phoenix

PHOENIX                  A                    

Germany  Poland  (98 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Christian Petzold         Official site

Speak low when you speak, love,
Our summer day withers away
Too soon, too soon.

Speak low when you speak, love,
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift,
We’re swept apart too soon.

Speak low, darling speak low,
Love is a spark lost in the dark,
Too soon, too soon,
I feel wherever I go
That tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here
And always too soon.

Time is so old and love so brief,
Love is pure gold and time a thief.

We’re late darling, we’re late,
The curtain descends, ev’rything ends
Too soon, too soon,
I wait darling, I wait

Will you speak low to me,
Speak love to me and soon.

—“Speak Low,” by Kurt Weill (written while in exile in America) and Ogden Nash, 1943, Billie Holiday Speak Low YouTube (4:26)              

Like the surprise hit of last year, 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida, Christian Petzold returns to form with this tense, brutally moving Holocaust drama that was inexplicably rejected by both Cannes and Venice, displaying another level of newfound maturity in his still evolving career with what is arguably his best film yet.  Like his others, it’s meticulously directed, but contains the most complexly intriguing story he’s ever worked with, another showcase for actress Nina Hoss, who is onscreen in nearly every shot in what is essentially an intensely personal search for a newly constructed post-war German identity, adapted by Petzold and the late Harun Farocki in his last screenplay, who worked with Petzold on and off since his very first feature THE STATE I AM IN (2000).  Loosely based on Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 detective novel Le Retour des Vendres (The Return of the Ashes), the film is accentuated by a beautifully understated and low key jazz score that both begins and ends the film, enticing the audience from the opening frame while also creating what is the most haunting ending of any film seen this year.  For a story that explores human identity, you won’t find a more symmetrically perfect screenplay from start to finish, where the formalism of its construction is marked by an economy of intricate precision, but this is a throwback to a Fassbinder style story where Germany is trying to come to terms with the evils of its own troubled past, with shades of THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979) and LILI MARLENE (1981), or an improvement on DESPAIR (1978), once more embellishing upon a film noir theme, the third time Petzold has used this device, where Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008) were impressionistic reconstructions of earlier films CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), where this one utilizes Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), as both use surgical reconstruction to evoke the medical atrocities of Nazi SS officer Josef Mengele’s fanatical quest for Aryan purity by performing deadly genetic experiments on Auschwitz concentration camp victims.  Hoss plays Nelly Lenz, a survivor of Auschwitz who is shot in the face in the waning days of the war, having to undergo painful facial reconstruction, introduced to the audience with her entire head covered with protective bandages, where her surgeon suggests after the war “a new face is an advantage,” as it allows one a fresh start in life.  Nelly, however, continues to dwell on her former life, which is unknown to the viewer and only comes together in bits and pieces, where her intentions remain shrouded in mystery for a good deal of the film, only really revealing herself in the magnificence of the final shot.      

Described as a Trümmerfilm (literally “rubble film”), narratively, the film has an interesting structure to it, continually shifting the perspective through the eyes of various characters while Nelly is forced to retreat into the background, lost inside her head, unable to recognize herself or even speak after the operation, where she’s painfully forced to admit that for all practical purposes, she no longer exists, Phoenix (Christian Petzold, 2014 YouTube (4:47).  Not only a war casualty, rescued after spending two years in Auschwitz, her essential humanity has been stripped from her as well, seen early on wandering through the bombed out ruins of postwar Berlin searching for any semblance of her former life.  With the help of a loyal friend Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf), a clerk in the Hall of Jewish Records who painstakingly goes through the files attempting to identify Nazi’s and reconstruct the lives of the missing, Nelly returns to Berlin for plastic surgery and a chance for rest and recovery, and while she’s not at all pleased with the results, finding it difficult to live with herself, it does allow her the opportunity to rebuild her shattered confidence.  Lene’s generosity and kindness are expressed in every frame, as she goes to great measures to protect Nelly and insure she is as comfortable as possible, consolidating her family assets, while it’s her fervent desire they may both move to a new Zionist homeland currently envisioned as Palestine, a safe refuge for Jews displaced by the war.  What better place to start a new life?  A staunch Nazi hater, Lene can’t continue to live among them or even bear listening to German songs anymore, though for Nelly, she continues to find rapturous delight in the Germany she once knew.  When shown pictures of Haifa, where they could live overlooking the sea, there is a suggestion of sexual undertone when Nelly almost contemptuously replies “I am not a Jew,” raising questions not only about her identity but her state of mind, a stranger to the changing world around her as she insists upon finding her lost husband Johnny, where thoughts of him were the only thing that kept her alive in the dark days of the camps where she lost her entire family. 

As much about individual destinies as an emphasis on social conditions, in their former lives Nelly was a cabaret singer to his piano playing, so she searches the bars for any trace of him, finally discovering him working as an impoverished busboy in a decadent Berlin night club appropriately named Phoenix, a music hall beer drinking establishment for soldiers featuring showgirls and musical entertainment, where we see a tawdry German rendition of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”  While she is petrified at what he will think, Johnny, Ronald Zehrfeld from Barbara (2012), doesn’t recognize her (described by the director in Cinema Scope [Adam Neyman] as two ghosts that can’t recognize each other), too busy scraping by at the bottom end of the wage scale.  Undeterred, she tries again, introducing herself as Esther (the name of her dead sister), to which he replies, “There aren’t many of those left,” where her persistence gets her thrown out of the club, but Johnny has other ideas, concocting an idea where he can use her resemblance to impersonate his dead wife who stands to inherit the family fortune locked away in a Swiss bank, becoming a mad homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), both men haunted by the tragic loss of their dead wives, literally trying to reinvent them with another woman, training them to look, act, and talk the same, wearing the same clothes and hair style, as if resurrecting a ghost.  Despite the wickedness of Johnny’s harebrained scheme, Nelly allows herself to be used, literally playing the part of herself, clinging to the beleaguered hopes that her husband would recognize her for who she is, at one point feverishly waking up Lene in the middle of the night to excitedly reveal, “I know he loves her” (referring to herself), but Johnny is equally certain of her death.  Lene has no interest in Johnny and in fact despises him, warning Nelly that it was Johnny who betrayed her to the Gestapo, where according to records she uncovered he was arrested two days before and was released on the same day as her arrest.  Lene’s profound influence over this film is remarkable, noted by her clear, unambiguous archival revelations and her measured assurance, as she comes to represent the Jewish reaction “after” the war, a voice of unwavering authority that some have chosen to ignore to this very day.   Refusing to believe the man she loves is a Nazi collaborator, having spent months during wartime hiding in a hole, Nelly has her own doubts, where her shattered interior world struggles to heal, but she willingly plays along with his tortuous game, and in doing so the audience delves even deeper into Johnny’s dubious personality. 

Delving into realms of moral duplicity, Petzold builds suspense by continually allowing unanswered questions to linger, where the audience remains in doubt whether Johnny ever loved her or could actually expose her to the Nazi’s, and is he just pretending not to know her real identity?  All the characters come under a broader cloud of suspicion in the immediate aftermath of the war, as who among them was not a willing participant?  What friends and neighbors were also collaborators and betrayers?  How many ordinary citizens simply looked the other way?  The setting itself is fraught with fear and suspicion, where the tantalizing mood is drenched in a suffocating atmosphere of dread.  The deeper one gets into the psychological plight of each character, the more the world around them is stained by the toxic lead-in to war.  Perhaps most revealing is a family photograph that Nelly discovers taken before the war, where circles have been placed around the heads of those identified as Nazi’s while crosses are placed above those that are now dead.  It’s a horrifying notion to think that one’s fondest memories have been defiled and contaminated by the despicable acts of one’s own country.  Brilliantly conceived and masterfully crafted, Petzold reaches elevated territory in this impressionistic psychological mosaic that becomes a literal postwar reawakening to the reality of the world around them.  Joining the ranks of essential postwar films, Petzold shows how delusion becomes a coping mechanism for an enveloping madness, like Johnny, whose refusal to recognize his wife (or the role he played in her capture) is not by accident, as he comes to signify those ordinary citizens blinded by their own willful collusion, refusing to see their own complicity in the crimes taking place around them, which may start out as fear or a defense mechanism, but saving themselves at any cost ends up becoming a way of life that eventually leads to the Holocaust.  Many more lives are lost to suicide even after the war is over as a result of “collateral damage,” a descent into a moral disillusionment that evokes a special note of sadness.  But this is ultimately a film about Nelly, a lone survivor whose longing to claw her way back into a reconstructed German society represents the need of an entire nation, where the agonizing doubts and concerns are reflected in the marvelously subtle performance by Nina Hoss, who is the real star of the show in a remarkable portrait of a devastated society suffering the impact of enormous historic crimes, where the postwar debacle is revealed in the broken wreckage of fallen debris and ruined lives.  Shot in the Brandenburg region in Germany by Hans Fromm’s dark cinematography, with a few shots in Wroclaw, Poland, the jazz score by Stefan Will is particularly expressive, setting the tone of eloquent, emotional restraint.  If this film does anything, however, it delivers enormously with a huge payoff in the virtuosic final scene, where everything in the entire film leads to this moment, and Petzold delivers with one of the great cinematic endings that resonates so powerfully that it will become one of the most discussed shots in the annals of cinema history, Speak Low performed by Nina Hoss @ Phoenix YouTube (3:01, recommend not to be watched until “after” seeing the film), where part of its power is its unexpectedness, yet according to the director, TIFF Review: Petzold's “Phoenix” Soars – City By Heart, the ending plays out quite differently in front of German audiences.  By itself, it’s hardly spectacular, but seen in context with everything that has come before, the composite effect is simply stunning, an indictment of Johnny, and the nation’s, collective forgetfulness, where the specter of the past seeps into the uncertain present and all lingering questions and concerns are finally put to rest.  

An excerpt from Jeffrey Fleishman’s interview with the director from The LA Times, July 29, 2015, World Cinema: Christian Petzold's 'Phoenix' haunted by ...

The eerie mood and questions raised by “Phoenix” have intrigued Petzold.  He said his next film will be set in the 1940’s in the French town of Marseille as refugees hide and hurry to catch boats to Mexico as the German army closes in.  Part of him, he said, wants to capture the aura and verve of German filmmakers, such as Fritz Lang and Max Ophüls, who fled to America to escape Hitler.

“The light from Germany went to the U.S.A. in the 1930s,” he said.  “We have to bring the light and style back to Germany, especially the noir which was created by Austrian and German refugees.” 

The Imitation Game

Alan Turing (left) and actor Benedict Cumberbatch

Alan Turing at age 16

THE IMITATION GAME           B                     
Great Britain  USA  (114 mi)  2014  d:  Morton Tyldum            Official site

Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine.

Morton Tyldum is the Norwegian director of Headhunters (Hodejegerne) (2011), a stylish crime thriller running on high octane that treats the audience to a savagely vicious world of unleashed villainy, while here he exposes one of the dark secrets of Great Britain’s past, their ill-advised persecution of the one man that nearly single-handedly invented a machine that decrypted the German messages in World War II and helped the Allies win the war.  While most of us didn’t read about this in our history books, that’s because the information remained classified for the next 50 years.  The subject of the film is the great British mathematician Alan Turing, a brilliantly educated gay man of genius (modestly comparing himself poorly to the academic exploits of Einstein in the film) who devised a number of groundbreaking techniques for breaking German codes.  Winston Churchill said Turing made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany, where historians now believe he may have helped advance the end of the war by two years and in the process save 14 million lives.  Despite his status as a war hero (which was not recognized publicly due to continued government secrecy), Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, which remained against the law in Britain until decriminalization in the mid 60’s.  In something out of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), as an alternative to prison, he accepted what amounts to chemical castration by taking female hormone injections, dying two years later at the age of 41 from self-inflicted suicide by cyanide poisoning.  It took until 2009 for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make an official government apology for “the appalling way he was treated,” while the Queen also granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013.  Based on the Andrew Hodges book, Alan Turing:  The Enigma, which he began writing in 1977, released in 1983, it’s interesting that the book was written by a mathematician, currently a Research Fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University, where his interest developed from his similar background, but also from his participation in the gay liberation movement of the 1970’s.  

Despite his notoriety today, Turing remained a mysterious figure during his lifetime, a man shrouded in secrecy, where MI6 Secret Intelligence Agent Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) points out he would have been a perfect candidate as a spy, telling him he was exactly the man he hoped he would turn out to be when he recruited him.  The film is told during three periods of his life, his teenage schooldays, wartime service, and his final years in the early 1950’s, continually moving back and forth in time, opening with the scratchy recording of the 1939 radio broadcast of King George VI declaring war on Germany, which is the same speech from Tom Hooper’s Academy Award winning picture THE KING’S SPEECH (2010).  As that film relied upon a superb performance by Colin Firth as the stuttering King, this does the same with Benedict Cumberbatch as the brilliant Turing, where what both films have in common is they are handsome, well-made, informative, dignified, yet also exceedingly bland.  While this is a highly unconventional subject matter, the film itself couldn’t be more safely conventional, where any reference to homosexuality has been so deeply eliminated and hidden from view, mentioned only through coded references, that this could easily pass for a Disney film.  In other words, it helps if you’re familiar with the subject matter ahead of time, as there is little mention of actually “being” gay.  This is a far cry from the dreaded anguished realms of Hell described by impeccably educated, Catholic-bred, fellow Brit Terence Davies in his intensely personal ode to his hometown of Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008), a much more emotionally devastating work where he bashes the Catholic Church for instilling in him an overwhelming sense of fear and guilt while growing up gay, eventually rejecting the church altogether, where he admittedly now lives an asexual lifestyle.  Turing, unfortunately, never survived to appreciate the benefits of his own tiresome efforts, where he basically invented an initial model for what we now commonly call computers.  Had he survived the socially repressive era of the 50’s, he would be lauded and celebrated on a number of fronts today, and while hardly the definitive Alan Turing film, leaving out huge gaps in his life, hopefully this is not the last word on the subject. 

Certainly the main problem with the film is the detached unlikability of the main character as he works in near isolation at Bletchley Park, a secret British cryptography unit at the Government Code and Cypher School that was formed to crack Germany’s Enigma machine code, where despite the horrors that are foisted upon him early in life, including being brutally bullied by others at school, he remains unsympathetic throughout because of the routine way he’s so dismissive of others,  His callous disregard for other people, particularly during wartime when nerves are already on edge from nightly bombings, is beyond offensive and near psychotic.  While the film attributes it to how much smarter he is than others, his hubris and extreme arrogance are symptomatic of deeper psychological problems that are left unexplored.  Instead, the film counterbalances his sneering coldness with a warmhearted figure in Keira Knightley as his sole friend, Joan Clarke, a woman he hires because of her own brilliance in solving puzzles.  But she provides all the social etiquette that he’s incapable of, which includes graciously smiling and being friendly, while Turing criticizes and belittles the ineffectiveness of his coworkers while continually alienating them.  His indifference is reminiscent of Stephen Hawking’s portrayal in The Theory of Everything (2014), who is seen in a much more positive light through the loving eyes of his wife whose book was adapted for the film.  Except for those private moments when Turing is seen with Clarke, he is almost exclusively alone, though the person having the greatest impact on his life was his only friend at Sherborne School, Christopher Morcom (Jack Banner), his first love, where the two were the smartest students in class, but his untimely death from tuberculosis shattered Turing’s religious faith, sparking a career as a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist, but also the idea of whether a machine might contain the intelligence of a human being, where he named his code-breaking machine after Christopher, while also inventing the “Turin test,” or “Imitation game,” a series of questions designed to determine whether you were speaking to a person or a “thinking” machine.  Near the end of his life Turing is portrayed as a lone eccentric, having lost all his family and friends, where all that’s left is Christopher looming inside his apartment taking up an entire wall, like a place of worship, or the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the accompanying music by Alexandre Desplat might actually be described as exalting.  Turing’s life was portrayed earlier by Derek Jacobi in a made-for-television movie called BREAKING THE CODE (1996), and who can forget Dougray Scott as the tortured codebreaker in a fictionalized version, with Kate Winslet and Jeremy Northram along for window dressing in ENIGMA (2001), but this Hollywood version with Cumberbatch offering the intellectualized, award-worthy performance will have a much greater impact.  It’s been a banner year for science in movies, with portrayals of real life scientists Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking, and let’s not forget the fictionalized NASA pilot turned space traveler Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) in Interstellar (2014).   

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Hitchcock surrounding himself with beauty on the set of The Lady Vanishes, 1938

Hitchcock on the set with Dame May Whitty and Emile Boreo

Hitchcock on the set with Margaret Lockwood

Hitchcock with Margaret Lockwood

Hitchcock cameo

THE LADY VANISHES            A-                

Great Britain  (97 mi)  1938  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

I don’t see how a thing like cricket can make you forget seeing people.

—Charters (Basil Radford)

When one thinks of Hitchcock’s greatest films, they usually revolve around Shadow of a Doubt (1943), NOTORIOUS (1946), STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), REAR WINDOW (1954), Vertigo (1958), NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959), and Psycho (1960), where his British films rarely enter into the discussion.  British film critic David Thomson, for instance, acknowledges that “Hitchcock in England is a career unto itself,” but does not include any of the British films on his list of the director's greatest works.  David Denby writing for The New Yorker wrote, “In recent decades, critical consensus has settled on the American movies from the fifties.”  That means Dial M for Murder (1954), The Trouble With Harry (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), The Birds (1960), and even Rebecca (1940) are often mentioned before his British classics The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Young and Innocent (1937), and what is arguably his most definitively British film, THE LADY VANISHES (1938).  Ironically the film originated with an American director, Roy William Neill, for a film called The Lost Lady, produced by Edward Black, where a crew was sent to former Yugoslavia for initial background shots, but the police interfered, thinking Yugoslavs were not being well-portrayed in the film, so they were booted out of the country.  A year later, Black offered the film to Hitchcock, which features an exquisite screenplay enhanced by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, who turned it into one of his best British films. Hitchcock actually received a cable in the middle of shooting this film from producer David O. Selznick in America asking him to come to Hollywood to direct a picture and the rest is history.  Unlike Fritz Lang’s master criminal in his thrillers who has the capability to cloud other men’s minds through hypnosis and disguise, creating hallucinogenic qualities, Hitchcock often uses a luring spirit from beyond the grave, such as the ghostly presence of Rebecca (1940), or Madeleine/Carlotta in Vertigo (1958), Mrs. Bates in Psycho (1960), not to mention the lingering presence of the cadavers in ROPE (1948), REAR WINDOW (1954), and The Trouble With Harry (1955).  Meeting Hitchcock in Hollywood a few years after THE LADY VANISHES, British-American actor and film producer John Houseman found him to be “a man of exaggeratedly delicate sensibilities, marked by…the scars from a social system against which he was in perpetual revolt and which had left him suspicious and vulnerable, alternately docile and defiant.”  Hitchcock was born and raised in London, where according to author and academic Charles Barr in his Criterion essay, The Lady Vanishes: Tea and Treachery: 

The son of a tradesman, Hitchcock was exposed to the subtle brutalities of the English class system from an early age, both in his own education and as a precocious London theatergoer fascinated by the work of such anatomists of English society as Shaw and John Galsworthy.  Like any British filmmaker of the period, he could hardly have avoided class issues when he began as a director in 1926, and his films show a consistent sharpness in handling them, in particular the tensions created by relationships across a class divide, as in the silent films The Lodger (1927) and The Manxman (1929) and the early sound films Murder! (1930) and The Skin Game (1931).

While Hitchcock was a Londoner at heart, he was also European and cosmopolitan, traveling frequently whenever possible, influenced both by key elements within his national culture as well as formative cinematic influences from elsewhere, such as German expressionism, Hollywood cinema, and Soviet montage.  So it should perhaps come as no surprise that this film is a beautiful composite of these various cultural influences, adapted from the 1936 novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, where the film is a romantic espionage thriller that was largely a metaphor for the peace that was about to vanish in Europe.  The film was made in the same year as Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement to Nazi Germany in the Munich Agreement, symbolizing the failure of the West to prevent the annexation and eventual occupation of Czechoslovakia which would be doomed to seven years of Nazi domination, but also Poland’s subsequent invasion in 1939, conditions that lead to the outbreak of World War II.  The film is set in the fictional mountains of an unnamed European country, where the trains have stopped running as an avalanche has stranded the mostly British characters in a picturesque mountain resort, introduced in near storybook fashion where the mountainous backdrop has obviously been artfully painted, while the initial shots zooming into the snowbound village, “one of Europe’s few undiscovered corners,” is clearly a miniature set, featuring toy trains, powdered snow, and frozen figurines, all adding a touch of playfulness.  While the early hotel scenes play out as a comedy of manners, a British comic farce with Hitchcock deriving pleasure at the misfortunes of the British travelers having to put up with the discomforts and confusions of life abroad, as the hotel is besieged by panicked customers who will need another night’s accommodations, the film is essentially a train journey of British passengers anxious to get home who form a microcosm of English society, all filmed in one train car (the rest were miniatures or artificially realized), where the audience becomes absorbed by the characters and the story.  Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne), are an amusing gay couple who represent the idle rich, the same ruling classes that are working to appease Hitler, where they are more worried about a cricket match than the concerns of others.  Stalled at the desk waiting for a room, they are appalled at the attention given to several spoiled and attractive young girls whose idea of wealth is marrying into it, somehow detesting this idea, as represented by the young and beautiful heroine, Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood), an heiress returning home to marry some fabulously wealthy, father-approved Lord who comes with a title and his own coat-of-arms, celebrating her last night with champagne.   

Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) is the elderly, but surprisingly spry governess enthralled by the local music, and if you blink you’ll miss that the musician she is listening to on the streets below is snuffed out in an instant, unseen by anyone, adding a gripping element of terror to the nonstop comedy, where in this film Hitchcock cleverly disguises and prolongs the sense of urgency from an existing, though largely unseen danger that could threaten all their lives, yet the rising tension is balanced by breezy, lighthearted British comedy throughout.  Musicologist Gilbert, Michael Redgrave in his first starring role, rudely refuses to stop making plenty of racket in his room above Iris, where the two begin as arch enemies, bickering incessantly, though in that delightfully cultivated British sense of humor. Both Gilbert and Miss Froy are coy about their class status, neither one mentioning their past, though both are cultured and well educated.  Finally there is Mr. Todhunter (Cecil Parker), perhaps a lawyer of some sort and his attractive female companion, aka Mrs. Todhunter (Linden Travers), where both are probably cheating on their respective spouses and more concerned about not being detected.  Just before they board the train, Iris has just been hit over the head by a second story window planter that appears to have been intentionally dropped, though likely targeting someone else.  Miss Froy takes her under her wing and looks after her on the train, offering her some tea, the British cure for everything.  Falling asleep afterwards, by the time she awakes, Miss Froy has vanished.  Iris searches the train, but all the other passengers deny ever having seen her, while documents have apparently been forged by the wait staff to suggest Iris earlier had tea alone.  All of this is a growing mystery, where the only person to come to her aid is Gilbert, who feels it’s the only right and honorable thing to do, to help a lady in distress.  They  run into a brick wall, however, where some people have their own private reasons not to get involved, while others are secret collaborators in a Nazi spy ring, but Iris grows more hysterical by the minute, eventually pulling the lever to stop the train.  This draws the ire of most passengers, who begin to think of her as that crazy lady, where Paul Lukas, winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor for WATCH ON THE RHINE (1943), beating out Humphrey Bogart from CASABLANCA (1942), plays a seemingly compassionate brain surgeon Dr. Hartz who attributes the problem to the bump on her head, claiming it’s a very common Freudian symptom for those suffering from concussion-related hallucinations and offers to treat her at his clinic later that same evening. 

The viewer has every reason to believe Iris is going out of her mind, even though evidence seen with our own eyes suggests otherwise, where something sinister hangs in the air.  To unravel the mystery, they search every car and every compartment, where they even discover another woman dressed exactly like Miss Froy, which only adds to the intrigue.  It has the macabre underground atmosphere of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet who specialize in the art of the double-cross, always meeting in secrecy while conducting shady business transactions, as there’s a cloud of suspicion hanging over everyone’s head.  By a process of elimination, they have only to confirm the identity of Dr. Hartz’s patient, whose face is wrapped in bandages, guarded by a Catholic nun (Catherine Lacy), reportedly deaf and dumb, though later we hear her speaking perfectly, actually changing sides and helping the British couple, a similar theme initiated earlier in Number Seventeen (1932).  A key clue gives the nun away, opening the door to new possibilities, actually saving their lives when the doctor, who turns out to be a cold-blooded Nazi agent, thinks the snooping team is getting too close, miraculously finding Miss Froy underneath all those bandages, while exchanging patients with the woman wearing her identical clothes, replacing the bandages over her face.  As the doctor gets off with his patient at his intended stop, however, he discovers something is amiss, where we see him speaking to various military officials.  While for a moment Miss Froy is free to breathe again, Gilbert makes an announcement to the British passengers in the train’s dining car just as they are having tea (of course) explaining the nefarious activities of the good doctor who attempted to kidnap Miss Froy, suggesting they all may be in trouble.  With this announcement, the dining car has been separated from the train and shifted to a side track, where it rolls to a stop in the middle of a forest.  Cars can be seen through the trees, along with Dr. Hartz and several military men, where the reaction of the group mimics the standard European reaction to the growing Nazi threat, suggesting things like this don’t happen, they seem like reasonable sorts, perhaps we could reason with them, where Todhunter proclaims with the same assurance as Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies), the bird expert in The Birds (1960), “They can’t possibly do anything to us.  We’re British subjects.”  Leave it to the gayest character on the train, Caldicott, to retort, “Pacifist?  Won’t work.  Christians tried it and got thrown to the lions.”  But as the soldiers quickly advance with guns pointed, Gilbert fires at them before allowing armed men to take over the train.  Disregarding the warnings of others, Todhunter takes the appeasement route and declares, “This is madness, I’ll go out and speak to them,” but he’s shot on the spot, despite carrying a white handkerchief. 

There on that train, in the middle of some nameless forest, a firefight breaks out.  It’s only then that Miss Froy reminds them all, “You shouldn’t judge any country by its politics.  We English are quite honest by nature,” revealing she is carrying government secrets, which have been coded into a musical melody that she heard out her window that night, quickly teaching it to Gilbert before she escapes out the back way.  Leave it to the oldest among them to show her true colors, reminding the embattled group that it will take all of them to stand up to this fascist scourge.  Only by banding together, instead of meekly minding their own business, are they able to change the dark tide, but only through the self-sacrifice of the only working class Brit aboard, where no one in this group even recognizes a lower-class London accent, disguised earlier as the foreign nun, as she turns out to be a civilian Englishwoman that helps save the day.  This is a different kind of espionage film, unlike the gun-toting, misogynistic, martini-drinking James Bond films, as this represents a far more accurate portrayal of the enormous contribution made by female intelligence agents.  Bletchley Park where the Allies decrypted the Nazi codes during WW II was largely run by women, where Churchill referred to these invaluable women as being “the geese who laid the golden eggs, but did not cackle.”  American chef and television personality Julia Child worked for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war, working directly for the head of OSS, General William J. Donovan.  In much the same way, Charters and Caldicott, the cricket obsessed gay Brits who are the most jovial couple in the film, rise to the occasion and prove to be patriotic Englishmen who do not hesitate to use force to defend themselves.  They clearly foreshadow the role of the great British mathematician Alan Turing, the subject of THE IMITATION GAME (2014), a brilliantly educated gay man who devised a number of groundbreaking techniques for breaking German codes.  Winston Churchill said Turing made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany.  Nonetheless, showing the depths of how depraved and empty-headed government cabinet ministers can be (a view likely shared by Hitchcock), Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952.  In something out of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), as an alternative to prison, he accepted what amounts to chemical castration by taking female hormone injections, dying two years later from cyanide poisoning.  It took until 2009 for Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make an official government apology for “the appalling way he was treated.” The Queen also granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013.  Like Renoir’s RULES OF THE GAME (1939) made a year later, there’s a special significance for these films coming on the dawn of World War II, as they are, among other things, a prophetic commentary on the troubled times, anticipating the cataclysmic events to come, while also serving as a clarion call to arms against the forces of fascism. 

Note – The Hitchcock cameo comes at the 92-minute mark where Hitchcock, wearing a black coat and puffing on a cigarette, is seen walking on the platform of London’s Victoria Station as Iris and Gilbert are returning to the city.