Neil Doyle Robert Donat gives a very spirited performance as a British spy fluent in languages who is assigned to sabotage a Nazi gas factory in Czechoslovakia. He's more action-oriented than usual in a role requiring a lot of physical action while keeping one step ahead of the Nazis.His spying activities also include some romantic moments with lovely Valerie Hobson, a woman who openly flirts with Nazi officers while working with the Czech underground. She and Donat join forces eventually but some misunderstandings almost ruin their partnership. The clever plot takes a number of interesting twists as the story unfolds in a brisk and very compelling manner.Photography is first rate as are the various sets, especially the unique looking laboratory with its glass elevator overlooking an elaborate looking set design. Donat is charming in the central role and gets solid support from an excellent British supporting cast. Especially good are Walter Rilla as an officer in love with Hobson and Glynis Johns in a small role as an ill-fated Czech loyalist.Highly recommended as one of the best espionage yarns from the U.K. during the war years.

theowinthrop Robert Donat is one of my favorite actors of the 1930s to 1950s. Despite a relatively small film output (roughly 25 movies I believe) Donat showed a wide variety of different parts, including comedy, historical, character studies, spy films (including THE 39 STEPS for Hitchcock), and straight drama. He never gave a bad performance even if the film left some problems. And all was accomplished despite being a serious asthmatic. To top it off, he pulled off the all time miracle "Oscar" for best actor. He beat Clarke Gable in 1939, when Gable's "Rhett Butler" was the odds favorite for best role. Donat trumped it with the schoolmaster, "Mr. Chipping", in GOODBYE MR. CHIPS. Fans of GONE WITH THE WIND may have cause to grumble (forgetting Gable already won the Oscar as "Peter Warne" in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT) but fans of Donat (and they included Walter Matthau, who said he was his favorite actor) have never complained.SABOTAGE AGENT is known in the U.S. as THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU. The title change is understandable. There are so many films with "sabotage" in the title (Hitchcock had "SABOTAGE" in 1936 and "SABOTEUR" in 1943). But the name is misleading accidentally. "Jan Tartu" is the false identity name given to Donat's character Captain Terence Stevenson when he is sent on a mission into Czechoslovakia during World War II. The ADVENTURES OF STEVENSON would have been less misleading on this point, but people might have thought that it referred to the author of TREASURE ISLAND.Stevenson, a linguist, has been on home watch duty, but is selected for the mission due to his grasp on central European languages, specifically, Czech, Roumanian, and German (a neat trick, by the way, as these are from three separate language groups: Slavic, Latin, and Germanic - Stevenson must have been like my father, a real super expert on foreign tongues). The real Tartu (who has conveniently been killed) was a member of Roumania's native Fascist group, "The Iron Guard". The Roumanians joined the Axis in 1941, having seen what happened to the most pro-Western Balkan state (Yugoslavia) which was invaded and bombed (as was Greece). Roumania and Bulgaria (the latter reluctantly) joined the Nazis (Roumania did it willingly in expectation of expanding its borders, Bulgaria to protect itself from the Russians under Stalin). It's instructive to follow what happened in both countries. From the King on down in Bulgaria there was a general refusal to cooperate in sending Jews to their deaths in German camps, so that 90% of Bulgaria's Jews (the largest number of ANY country in Europe) survived World War II. Roumania handed the bulk of them over.Donat goes to Prague as Tartu, and plays him as a flamboyant nitwit. The Nazis have little real use for him in Prague (he is there on some trivial diplomatic excuse) and find him more of a nuisance than anything else. Donat decides to allow the Nazis to find just useless he is - in one sequence he manages to insist on "helping" them capture an anti-Nazi partisan. Of course the partisan escapes while the Nazis are forced to see "Tartu" pounding on a wall as though he is doing something remarkably clever.The mission is to find the secret factory where a deadly new gas is being manufactured (this is a running theme in many films of the 1930s and 1940s - a secret poison gas that some country is manufacturing to use on the battlefield: memories of the battles of World War I prevented people from considering poison gas used on civilian prisoners for "ethnic cleansing" purposes). With the assistance of Glynis Johns and Valerie Hobson Donat does find the factory, cleverly hidden within a mountain. Now the problem is to destroy it, which leads to an exciting conclusion within the factory within the mountain.Unusual for most Donat films (only KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR has as much daring-do involving Donat and co-star Marlene Dietrich fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1919) THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU is a good escapist film. Although the references in it put it firmly in 1943 when it was made it is still an entertaining film for today. The performances are good, with Johns quite moving as she sacrifices herself for Donat's mission, and Hobson being forced to descend to murder to help as well. I recommend it for those performances, as well as Donat's over-the-top one as the eccentric "Iron Guardist".

max von meyerling THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU, aka SABOTAGE AGENT contains some of the most wonderfully silly propaganda to survive WW2. In the darkest days of the war, British propaganda used every means possible to raise the moral of the British people. Char women would go to France and destroy gestapo headquarters. Churchill's friend and a member of the Royal family disobeyed orders and lost his ship and this became the uber heroic IN WHICH WE SERVE. Lesle Howard, a real life secret agent, reprised the Baroness Orczy character in Nazi held Europe as Pimpernel Smith. While full scale efforts against Germany in Norway, Greece and France were full scale disasters, the notion in propaganda films was that one man could wreak almighty justice upon the Nazi monster.In SABOTAGE AGENT aka ADVENTURES OF TARTU, the slight and sickly Robert Donat is gotten up as a master war hero. He is introduced as a cool headed, cold blooded bomb disposal expert who is drafted into being flown to Romania in the disguise of a well known (but dead) Rumanian near do well, giving Donat a chance to do a stereotypical and quite insulting imitation of what some more offensive Englishmen would call a 'greasy wog'. As a repulsive womanizing slime ball who is also a high ranking member of the Rumanian equivalent of the fascists, it doesn't take long before Donat has presented himself at a Czechoslovakian factory producing poison gas. It is Donat's mission to blow up the factory before they can ship the gas which he does escaping with his new girlfriend and assorted helpers and contacts in a stolen JU-88 .Its been said that when Goebbels saw British propaganda he was so thrilled that it was so crude because that meant German propaganda was so superior. In the end, of course, the quality of propaganda had no effect on the war. Except for seven films, all German propaganda films were made to lull the population into a sense of well being by NOT focusing on the issue at hand (the war). The British preferred to show how they were prevailing (which they weren't) and would prevail over the enemy. In other words - lies all around.The reality was very different. Nationalists su generis hate each other nationalities, even their allies, and the Germans were quite contemptuous of the Rumanians who were considered unreliable in battle. They wouldn't have allowed one no matter how puffed up their CV and references were within a million miles of a top secret project. The Germans are seen as a bunch of horny buffoons easily outsmarted with out their being any sense of the systematic rings of security and cumbersome but defensive bureaucracy surrounding a military occupation.Attempts at sabotage in Czechoslovakia by organized resistance, particularly in the Skodawerk were met with mass reprisal, particularly at the Skoda werk. The most famous operation in Czechoslovakia was the assassination of the Reich protector Heidrich, which was carried out, for political reasons, by members of the Czechoslovakian Army parachuted in for the task which resulted in repression so serious that the Czech resistance was effectively eliminated as a fighting force for the rest of the war and the town of Lidice was destroyed, the men murdered, the women and children scattered and the town razed and plowed under. The incident was so notorious in its time, plays, operas, poetry and at least two films (HANGMEN ALSO DIE, directed by Fritz Lang and HITLER'S MADMAN, directed by Douglas Sirk, were made of the story. The free world swore to remember Lidice forever. It forgot. And poison gas, the Germans had plenty of it which, even to the end, they didn't use in battle. Except on Jews in the Concentrations Camps.Such isn't the concern of the propaganda film however. What's needed is one guy with a steel resolves, good nerves and a bit of luck on his side. A briefcase full of little bombs are enough to take out a whole mountainside. Today the ideal hero, or 'Good Guy' would be SFX'd committing visually unlikely and physically impossible deeds to a crashingly loud soundtrack a la MISSION IMPOSSIBLE or others of that ilk. This is the ancestor of those super action heros, when there was still a lingering illusion that somehow he'd be, well, a gentleman. Hence Donat and not Schwarzenegger or Stallone shows up.The weirdest thing I found about the film is the escape. I've looked at the film multiple times and I can't figure out from certain shots if they were somehow using a real JU-88 or a mock -up. Would they, in circa 1942-43, take the time and expense to make a flyable JU-88, or did they actually have a flyable one on hand? I can piece out how they might have gotten a hold of one and why they would want to keep it flyable. (One was flown to Great Britain in May 1943). And was the 'they' behind this project MGM or either or both the British and American governments? The director and writers were from Hollywood though the film was made in London and all of the technicians were British. Some shots of the JU-88 could be a miniature (when the plane is seen flying into a cloud), some could be file film (the JU-88 is first seen in a rear projection process shot), some shots could be made using a full scale mock up (very expensive) and even be made to appear to be taxiing, but there are some other shots that could only be made by a flyable airframe. A Beaufort Bomber had been used for a few seconds in the beginning of the film and I thought one could have been given some cosmetic surgery but the long nacelles for the Junkers Jumo engines behind their large radial radiators are pretty unmistakable. Apparently the propaganda films could be somewhat cheesy as film but never cheep.

bkoganbing Robert Donat's Eastern European background and fluency in a few languages make him the ideal choice for British Secret Service to send on a mission to destroy a Nazi poison gas factory in occupied Czechoslovakia. In a brief prologue with Donat disarming a buzz bomb that landed in a hospital, we see an example of how he keeps his cool under fire.Sabotage Agent next has Donat in Czechoslovakia disguised as a refugee from the Nazi sympathizing Iron Guard of Romania. Donat moves effortlessly from the stiff upper lip British agent to the bumptious Jan Tartu of Romania. He keeps his wits about him pretty good in a whole bunch of situations.Especially since he loses his contact upon arriving in Czechoslovakia almost immediately and is flying blind. Another agent is Valerie Hobson who like Donat is always good. She's a Czech who's a collaborator officially, but is really working for the Czech underground. She doesn't know what to make of Donat. One thing is sure, her Nazi boy friend Walter Rilla is plenty jealous.I have to say that the action packed ending was a bit much. It was like Donat was trying to compete with Errol Flynn. Something a little more clever I would have expected from his character. This was more like something from James Bond.Nevertheless Donat and Hobson give good characterizations and also Glynis Johns as another Czech patriot gives a memorable performance.