by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Miss V from Moscow
has sometimes been called the worst World War II “B” ever made. It’s not that
bad, though it has its risible elements — notably some of the silliest plot
devices ever put into a movie and one of the most bizarre mishmashes of accents
ever collected on the same soundtrack. It was basically the attempt of the PRC
studio (the initials stood for “Producers’ Releasing Corporation,” though given
the low quality of much of their output the joke around Hollywood was it really
meant “Pretty Rotten Crap”) to do their own World War II-themed movie of
espionage and intrigue. The plot (the script was by Arthur St. Claire and
Sherman T. Lowe) had the makings of a decent, if not deathlessly great, movie:
Russian agent Vera Marova (Lola Lane, on her way down after she and her sisters
Rosemary and Priscilla all got star buildups at Warners in the late 1930’s) is
called into the office of her commissar and given an assignment: because of her
striking resemblance to German agent Greta Hiller, recently secretly murdered
in France by Resistance fighters, she’s going to be infiltrated into Paris,
where she will impersonate Hiller, ingratiate herself with the Germans running
occupied France, and learn the location of German submarine fleets so the U.S.
convoys shipping arms and supplies to the Soviet Union can either avoid them or
sink them. She nearly gets caught in the French countryside when, disguised as
a peasant and hiding in a hay cart, she’s spotted by a German officer (one
wonders why the Germans have this guy staking out a road in the middle of
nowhere) who pokes his bayonet through the hay, shoots the cart’s driver and
forces Vera to run through the woods to avoid getting shot herself. “What? Is
she going to run all the way to
Paris?” I wondered — and indeed, one jump-cut later director (and co-producer)
Albert Herman shows her in Paris, in an immaculate fashion-conscious street
dress, turning up for her contact with the Resistance (who betrays her to the
Germans — or at least pretends to in order to establish her “German cred” with
the Nazi authorities) and then ingratiating herself with the Germans as
planned, notably Col. Wolfgang Heinrich (John Vosper). She wants to get his
secrets and he wants to get into her pants, but he’s got competition in the
latter department from escaping American pilot Steve Worth (Howard Banks), whom
she tells to hide in a closet so he isn’t caught by her German friends,
including police chief Fritz Kleiss (Cocaine Fiends star Noel Madison, second-billed here) and Captain
Richter (William Vaughn — according to imdb.com that’s a pseudonym for Wilhelm
von Brincken, which would certainly explain why of all the actors playing
Germans he’s the only one believable as one, even though he’s so blatantly
imitating Erich von Stroheim one wonders why Stroheim didn’t sue).
All the
German officers and Gestapo agents are completely fooled by Miss V’s
impersonation — even though Lola Lane’s sole concession to “Germanicity” was to
abandon the almost totally incomprehensible Russian accent she spoke with in
the opening reel and switch to … her normal American-accented English. She’s
caught out by the real Greta Hiller’s maid, Minna (Kathryn Shelton), who
notices differences in habits between her and the real Greta, and in the end
after a rather half-assed action sequence taking place in a bar, we see a
German firing squad aiming at an unseen victim and letting go, and just when we
think Miss V finally got it we see her and her American pilot beau in the back
of another hay truck, making their escape. In the middle of the movie Adolf
Hitler comes to Paris to deliver a speech to a huge rally of enthusiastic
French people — “When the hell did that happen?” any even remotely serious student of World War II history
will wonder (it didn’t; the scenes are stock shots lifted from Leni
Riefenstahl’s masterpiece Triumph of the Will) — which just underscores how silly much of Miss
V from Moscow is and how the typical PRC
sloppiness just takes away from what could in other hands (including other PRC
hands — what, one wonders, was Edgar G. Ulmer doing that week?) could have been
a minor but still entertaining little movie. There are a few good things about Miss
V from Moscow — the sets look like refugees
from Universal’s horror films (indeed I wondered whether Herman and his
producer, George Merrick, actually rented studio space from Universal and the
deal included using their old sets) and director Herman does some surprisingly
atmospheric moving-camera shots, while cinematographer Marcel le Picard (whose
“B” credits are often surprisingly inventive photographically even if, as with
the 1944 Bela Lugosi Monogram vehicle Voodoo Man, they dress up stories even sillier than this one)
does some effective quasi-noir
lighting effects (even though his lighting of Lola Lane is singularly
unflattering and makes her look like Marlene Dietrich c. 1960). The script also
does a better job of dramatizing how arbitrary and cruel Nazi rule was like
than some other, bigger-budgeted and better-plotted wartime dramas. But though Miss
V from Moscow is better than its
reputation, it’s still a pretty silly movie whose potential is undercut by
sloppy plotting and unappealing actors who (except for Vaughn né von Brincken) don’t seem to have a clue as to what
accent to adopt to convince us they’re the nationalities they’re supposed to be
playing.
