secondtake Secret People (1951)A British production, and very much about their view on the coming of World War II. It's gritty, interwoven with several main characters, and fairly dark.The film is a kind of revisiting of the build up to the war from one small personal point of view, filled with intrigue and international mixing. There are migrants and immigrants and a growing threat of an unnamed evil (though swastikas do appear in some inserted footage). It's complicated and exciting. Some key scenes happen early on in the 1937 Paris Exposition. It whispers and then it shouts. Most of the action is in mysterious London.The key actor, in my view, is Serge Reggiani, who is Louis, the evil foreigner up to disrupt the uneasy peace still alive in London. He has a subtle touch to his sinister intentions, and it lifts the movie up. The actual main character is also excellent, the tortured and trapped Maria played by another Italian actor, Valentina Cortese.It might be easy to look back at these times from more than a decade later. But it isn't easy to make it fresh, and to keep the tension make sense. Of course, now it is 60 years later and it becomes more of a drama with historical roots that have to be told by the movie, not assumed. At times the movie pulls this off with surprising sharpness. As the police get involved, it gets curiously complicated, good guys vs. bad guys, with no one quite fitting the clichés of other movies. The idea here is that the enemy is unexpected, and everywhere. It should be mentioned that we have Audrey Hepburn, whose first movie appearance was just one year earlier. She's not quite the Audrey we all know, but almost. Briefly. Great to see.The more I watched this movie the more I liked it. It might be an underrated gem in some ways. There is so much going on and really dramatic filming with often nearly pitch black scenes, inside or out.A final note. A chap at one point says, surprised, "A London girl made good coffee." How times have changed.

James Hitchcock "Secret People" is largely remembered for providing Audrey Hepburn with what has been described as "her first significant film role", although in fact her character Nora does not play a major part in the plot until the very end of the film. (The film is much more about her older sister Maria). Audrey seems to have been cast mainly on the basis of her dancing skills (she had trained at ballet school) because Nora is an aspiring ballerina and several dance sequences, with little connection to the main storyline, are featured. Her acting skills, however, must have impressed the director Thorold Dickinson because it was on the basis of a screen test he made with Audrey that she won the leading role in "Roman Holiday", her big Hollywood breakthrough.Nora and Maria arrive in London as political refugees after a dictator seizes power in their unnamed European homeland. Seven years later, Maria is reunited with her lover Louis who she learns is a member of a revolutionary organisation plotting to overthrow the country's government. Louis recruits Maria into the group and persuades her, much against her will, to take part in a plan to assassinate the dictator when he visits London. This places Maria in a dilemma. She has every reason to hate the regime, which was responsible for the death of her father, but also recalls that her father was a pacifist who would have disapproved of violence in any circumstances. Maria's dilemma becomes all the greater when the assassination plot goes wrong and the dictator survives but an innocent woman is killed instead. (The title "Secret People", incidentally, does not derive from any association with "secret agents" but from the idea that we all have a "secret person" hidden inside us, a "person" which becomes visible when we are under stress).The film's political stance is a potentially interesting one. Although it was made only a few years after the end of World War II, the treatment of Louis and his group is by no means as positive as one might expect. They are not shown as the moral equivalent of the European Resistance movements during the war itself, who were nearly always portrayed in a positive, even heroic, light. Dickinson seems to have wanted to imply that revolutionary movements can take on, if only subconsciously, something of the moral character of the governments they oppose, because Louis and his followers are fanatical, authoritarian and callous of human life, whether that be the life of innocent bystanders caught up in their schemes or the life of their own members whose loyalty is considered suspect. Any crime can be justified provided it furthers their cause. The film quotes W H Auden's well-known line that "We must love one another or die", but the attitude of Louis and his associates can be summed up in another Auden line- "The acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder".This is a potentially interesting theme, but it is not dealt with in a very interesting way. The character of Louis needed to be more developed in order to show how the once-idealistic young man whom Maria remembers has become a violent political fanatic and we could have learned more about the other members of the revolutionary cell. Instead, all the emphasis is on Maria, and matters are not helped by the fact that Valentina Cortese, here billed as "Cortesa", gives a rather dull performance, making Maria seem too cautious and indecisive ever to be plausible as an active accomplice to a political murder. When "Secret People" came out in 1952, the film critic of "The Times" described it as "a confused, inarticulate, disappointing film, neither as imaginative nor as intellectually exciting as it should be," and there is justice in that criticism. It is little-known today- I recently caught a rare television screening- and unlikely to appeal to many people except to Audrey Hepburn completists. 5/10A goof. The line "We must love one another or die" is quoted in the context of a scene set in 1930, but in fact it is taken from Auden's poem "September 1st 1939" which as its title might suggest was not written until 1939.

kenmyersproject It was said that the director Thorold Dickenson and his colleagues viewed Hitchcock's "Sabotage" before starting this film, and I'm not really sure if they learned anything. I do agree with both of the first reviewers for this in that it did have some promise, but it fell short. Perhaps because of the long delay before actual production of the project got under way when Ealing Studios saw it as an unusual product worth tackling.Valentina Cortesa did a marvelous job as a foreign refugee living in London who gets caught up in the intrigue unwillingly.This film was one of the only ones that I hadn't seen of Audrey Hepburn's earlier works. Although she only appears in it off and on she is given a broader speaking role than her previous earlier film 'walk-on' parts. She was quite able to act with the best of what this British Film Company had to offer, in a role a bit too understated for me. In fact, the whole film was a little too 'understated', dealing with a bomb plot planned by nationals of a foreign tyranny in 1930's London.I would watch this again, as it is now part of my library of hard to find films. I gave it an eight out of ten stars for Cortesa's performance and the early glimpse of Hepburn beyond a one minute spot.One does walk away from this film wishing it was better given it's premise, which is still very much a topic of today as it was then.If you can find a copy I would recommend it.

shbruce This is a seriously under-rated work of classical British film art on a compelling subject and is as relevant to London life today as it ever was. Considering this film was released in 1952 it explores so perceptively the path from praiseworthy ideology, through working for a noble cause, into terrifying involvement in an act of pure terrorism. Right through you are steadily but inexorably drawn with a lure of truth and justice, into a slowly evolving web of intrigue, conspiracy and ultimately murder, and it leaves you wondering at which point do you actually stray from idealism and decency into cold depravity? Given the '50s context, centred on an urban minority family, the actual plot is still frighteningly relevant and this film is surely just waiting for a re-make to bring it chillingly up to date. Until then, if you can find a copy of this film, watch it - its a vital and absorbing education, in the grand old style, on the strong subject of ideology.