Foreign Correspondent
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Short description
Foreign Correspondent is an American thriller set on the eve of the Second World War. John Jones, a crime reporter for a New York paper, is sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent to assess the likelihood of war. In London he is meant to interview a Dutch diplomat who holds the secret clause of an international agreement. When the diplomat is abducted by enemy agents in front of him, Jones sets out to find him, aided by an English journalist and by the daughter of a prominent pacifist.
Alfred Hitchcock directed the film, the fourteenth of the forty-three features he made, arriving between Rebecca and Suspicion. Charles Bennett, Richard Maibaum and Joan Harrison wrote the screenplay, and Walter Wanger produced it. Joel McCrea plays Jones, with Laraine Day as Carol Fisher, Herbert Marshall as her father Stephen Fisher, George Sanders as the journalist Scott ffolliott, Albert Bassermann as the diplomat Van Meer and Robert Benchley as Stebbins. The credited cast runs to a hundred players.
Reaction has been favourable across several measures. On IMDb the film holds 7.4 out of 10 from around 26,000 votes, and on TMDB it sits at 7 out of 10 from roughly 464 votes. A critics' rating of 8.3 out of 10 from forty-three reviews places professional assessment above both audience scores, which points to a thriller that reviewers have rated more highly than general viewers have.
What's left behind the scenes
- Hitchcock's cameo – at the beginning of the film, he walks in a coat and hat, reading a newspaper, as John Jones leaves the hotel before meeting Van Meer.
- Albert Bassermann, who played the role of the Dutch diplomat Van Meer, did not know a single word of English and simply memorized his lines.
- The scene where the plane crashes into the sea and water floods the cockpit with the pilots inside was filmed without any editing. For this, Hitchcock used a rear-projection screen made of paper, behind which he placed a water tank.
- Filming was completed on May 29, 1940, after which Hitchcock went to England to visit his mother. He returned on July 3 with news that the Germans were ready to start bombing at any time. Ben Hecht was urgently called in to write the final scene at the London radio station. The scene was filmed on July 5, and the actual bombing began on July 10.
- Film producer Walter Wanger was a pilot in World War I and believed that a propaganda film could have a significant impact on society. He spent his own $10,000 to acquire the rights to Vincent Sheean’s memoirs, “Personal History,” published in 1935, and attempted to write a screenplay about world revolutions starting with World War I through the eyes of a foreign correspondent. By 1939, he had not finished the screenplay, having spent $60,000. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Wanger hired two screenwriters – John Lay and John Meehan – to write a script based on Sheean’s memoirs, but dealing with a new world crisis. Wanger made an agreement with producer Selznick (with whom Hitchcock signed a contract on April 10, 1939, after which he moved from England to the USA, where he directed “Rebecca”) for Hitchcock to direct an anti-Nazi film. As a result, Hitchcock directed a thriller, but based on a script completely different from Sheean’s book.
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