Confidential Agent
                     
Director: Herman Shumlin
Year:  1945
Rating: 7.0
This was Lauren Bacall's follow up to her wonderful debut in To Have and Have Not the previous year in 1944. In To Have and Have Not of course she began her relationship with the much older Bogart and a series of very good films with him - The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo. Her chemistry with Bogart is so good that it covers to a large degree Bacall's lack of acting experience at this point in her career. She had basically been seen by Howard Hawks on a magazine cover and he called her in to test for To Have. Instant stardom.



In Confidential Agent she co-stars with the great romantic French star Charles Boyer, but it isn't Bogart and all her acting flaws are on full display. And there are plenty of them. It doesn't help that she is terribly miscast as the daughter of an English Lord with a Brooklyn accent that could crack an egg. Though her character softens near the end, she is as brittle and unlikable as a broken tooth. And photographed at times that accentuates her longish nose and large mouth. She hated her performance when she saw the film and thought it might destroy her career, but fortunately the next film The Big Sleep came to her rescue. Bacall was to constantly battle with Warner Brother's about the films they chose for her until she finally left.



This film is based on a Graham Greene novel of the same title and which I have read. It follows the book surprisingly closely. On many levels this is a terrific film - some great acting by the other co-stars, terrific noir like photography from James Wong Howe, an excellent score from Franz Waxman and a good dollop of suspense that plays out slowly with some great individual scenes. The director Herman Shumlin was more a theatrical director and only directed one other film, the excellent Watch on the Rhine in 1943.



It seems a bit odd that in 1945 after the war was over that they make a film about the Spanish Civil War which must have felt very far in the past. Boyer is an agent of the Spanish Republic (the good guys) and comes to London to try and negotiate a coal deal with English mine owners. He is beset from the opposition who want to stop him, some English dunderheads, betrayals all around him and this flighty obnoxious girl he meets after he disembarks from the boat. He is also perhaps the most passive inept agent one could assign to this task. It clearly has a Hitchcockian air about it from his Foreign Correspondent, 39 Steps period but it never quite clicks on all cylinders.



Like Hitchcock, it has terrific roles for the other players. It is really these other actors who keep this film alive and at times mesmerizing. Peter Lorre in sniveling mode, Dan Seymour as a Hindi observationist, George Zucco as a policeman and then in particular two great performances from Wanda Hendrix in her debut as a 14 year old maid at the hotel who is creepy and smitten at the same time and best is the Greek actress Katina Paxinou as the evil landlady who could scare a ghost on Halloween.