British Intelligence (Warner Bros., 1939, released 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next movie on TCM’s July 20 showcase of “B” pictures was British Intelligence, made in 1939 by Warner Bros. as the third film based on a 1918 play by Anthony Paul Kelly called Three Faces East. The play actually premiered in August 1918, while World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) was still going on. It was a confusing melodrama of shopworn situations in which the big problem was trying to figure out just who everyone was and what their agendas were. Three Faces East was filmed twice under its original title, in 1926 as a silent by Cecil B. DeMille’s short-lived Producers’ Distributing Corporation (PDC) and in 1930 as an early Warner Bros. talkie with Constance Bennett as the heroine and Erich von Stroheim as the German super-spy she’s trying to catch, or make contact with, or something. In 1939, just as World War II was getting underway (British Intelligence was released January 29, 1940, five months after the start of World War II, but it had been put into production before that), Warners decided this old plot line had become topical again. They assigned Lee Katz to write a new script in which a few of the German characters say that even if they lose the current war, a new leader will arise in Germany and lead them to victory and world conquest in the next one. (A lot of German films produced during the Nazi era had scenes like this offering premonitions of the rise of Adolf Hitler, but it’s rare to see one in a film made in one of the countries that would end up on the other side.)

The gimmick is that the Entente powers in general and the British in particular find that every time they try to launch a “surprise” attack on the German positions, the Germans know about it in advance. They attribute this to the skill of German super-spy Franz Strendler, who is running a series of secret agents in both Britain and France and manages to get the Entente battle plans almost literally before the ink has dried on them. But the film actually opens in a British field hospital in France, where nurse Helene von Lorbeer (Margaret Lindsay) is caring for a downed British flyer named Frank Bennett (Bruce Lester). But Helene von Lorbeer is really an operative for German intelligence, and as part of her responsibilities she’s assigned to infiltrate the home of Bennett’s family, including his dad Arthur (Holmes Herbert), his mom Maude (Winifred Harris), his brother George (Austin Fairman), and Col. James Yeats (Leonard Mudie), who’s actually part of British intelligence. Helene is given a cover identity as French refugee “Frances Hautry” and told her contact will be the Bennetts’ butler, Valdar (Boris Karloff). Helene is told by her German intelligence handlers that “Valdar” is really German agent Karl Schiller and she’s to get her instructions from him and relay any information she collects through him. Yeats overhears another member of the Bennett household, Henry Thompson (Lester Matthews), sending a secret message to German intelligence. Valdar in turn overhears Helene explaining that she’s actually a double agent for British intelligence, and he sets a trap for her when a captured German spy named Otto Kurtz (Frederick Giermann) shows up at the Bennetts’ home and demands that Helene shelter him.

Ultimately the film lurches to a climax of sorts when the British military cabinet decides for some reason to have their next meeting at the Bennett home – and Frank Bennett, having recovered, shows up at home where Helene is living and posing as an enemy agent when she’s in fact on the British side. The Germans plan to bomb the Bennett home by Zeppelin on the night of the Cabinet meeting, and in a final scene considerably less exciting than writer Katz and director Terry Morse (best known as the guy who added the Raymond Burr footage to the 1954 Japanese monster film Gojira to make the American release, Godzilla) thought it was, Valdar takes Helene hostage and reveals that he is Franz Strendler. (Ya remember Franz Strendler?) In the end, the Bennett house is bombed to smithereens but the British Cabinet gets away in time, Strendler is arrested, and Frank Bennett and Helene von Lorbeer end up a couple now that each can be sure the other is loyal to Britain. British Intelligence is not much of a movie, and it doesn’t help that even in a film lasting barely over an hour there’s too much confusion as to who everybody is and what their true loyalties are. For Boris Karloff fans it will be particularly disappointing because it’s one of all too many movies in which he had virtually nothing to do in the film but stand around and lurk; between this and films like Monogram’s The Ape (in which he played a mad scientist determined to harvest the spinal fluid of living humans to make a serum to treat his paralyzed daughter), one can readily see why Karloff said he needed Val Lewton “to save my artistic soul.” British Intelligence is the first of two films in which Boris Karloff remade a role originally played by Erich von Stroheim (the second was Lured, a 1947 remake by Douglas Sirk of a 1939 French film called Pièges – literally “lures” or “snares” – directed by fellow German expat Robert Siodmak), and it worked the other way around, too: when Karloff stepped out of the role of Jonathan Brewster in the Broadway premiere of Arsenic and Old Lace, Stroheim replaced him.