This classic among Hitchcock's British movies of the 30s draws, unusually for him, on the work of a major writer for its source--Joseph Conrad's tale of seedy London-based espionage,
The Secret Agent. Not that Hitch and his screenwriter, Charles Bennett, kept much of Conrad's novel beyond the bare bones of the plot. Verloc, an anarchist (played with appealing melancholy by Oscar Homolka), runs a South London fleapit cinema as a cover for his political activities. (In the original it's a porno bookstore--Hitch clearly thought the cinema was the nearest the censor would pass.) His young wife (the sad-eyed Sylvia Sidney) knows nothing of his undercover assignments. She's devoted to her naïve younger brother, and when Verloc involves the lad in his schemes the results are catastrophic.
The cast also features a young hero, a police detective woodenly played by John Loder, but Homolka and Sidney, as the sadly mismatched couple held together only by need, are unfailingly watchable as the brooding domestic atmosphere darkens towards tragedy. The trademark Hitchcock tension is well in evidence, though Hitch later reckoned he committed a "grave error" in letting one nail-biting scene end with the death of a sympathetic character (and a cute puppy). Though the film was shot almost entirely on studio sets, the director drew on his own Cockney childhood to create a wonderfully shabby, down-at-heel milieu of grubby London backstreets where the reek of gas lamps and rotting vegetables on the cobbles is all but palpable. --Philip Kemp
Product Description
A classic Hitchcock chiller based on the novel by Joseph Conrad. In Thirties London, unbeknown to his wife Sylvia (Sylvia Sidney), cinema manager Karl Verloc (Oscar Homolka) is acting as a paid saboteur. After Karl's cutting off of London's electricity supply fails to create the havoc his employers hoped for, Karl is charged with delivering a bomb to Piccadilly Circus. However, the police are already on his trail.
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