The first of those wars we know: in 1939, England declared war against Hitler's Germany and dug itself in for the long haul. The coming decade was to be one of hardship, want, and self-abnegation, in the service of standing up for principles and facing down monsters. Films like The Avengers were created as pop cultural propaganda, fashioned in concert with agencies like the War Office and the Air Ministry to dramatize why the war needed to be fought, and to valorize the mindset the country would need to endure that fight. Luckily for filmmakers, it was to be a war fought by spies as much as by soldiers. To make war movies about past conflicts meant staging massive battle scenes, but films about WWII could be like the inexpensive crime thrillers at which low-budget cinema already excelled. Secret identities, conspiracies, the trading of information-these kinds of stories were so much more intimate and easier to dramatize.
Director Harold French made something of a specialty of these. In 1942 alone he fashioned a hat trick of propaganda-tinged wartime thrillers: Unpublished Story, Secret Mission, and The Avengers. Two years later he added another pair to the roster: Mr. Emmanuel and English Without Tears. The end of the war in Europe took away his bread and butter, though, and French moved on to television work instead.
The Avengers begins with a portentous narrator proclaiming, "Terror rules in Europe! The people are chained! Yet their souls do not submit!" The story begins as the Nazis begin their spread across Europe, with England anxiously watching the news. Star Hugh Williams plays sports reporter Colin Metcalfe, newly appointed to post of foreign correspondent and sent off to Norway to keep track of developments there. In the sleepy village of Langedal, he meets a stout seawoman named Kari (Deborah Kerr) who finds his landlubber ways both ridiculous and charming. They uncover evidence that the Germans are preparing to invade Norway, but nobody listens or takes their fears seriously-partly because the local government is secretly conspiring with the Nazis. Once Norway falls to the advancing German forces, Metcalfe is recruited by the military for a secret mission.
Director Harold French finds this latter section more inspiring, and as Metcalfe changes from a carefree playboy journalist into a secret agent, the film ratchets up the tension. Cinematographer Bernard Knowles, photographer of the original 1940 version of Gaslight, carves deep shadows into the images, which editor Michael Chorlton shuffles together with increasing agitation as the stakes are raised. A film that started as an almost screwball comedy grows very dark-a metaphor for how the British audience was being called to steel itself against the struggle ahead.
For all its individual strengths, it is hard to watch The Avengers without wondering if French's writer Frank Owen and screenwriter Patrick Kirwan simply photocopied sections of Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) from two years previous. To understand why The Avengers operates like a poor-man's Foreign Correspondent is to discover England's other war, also begun in the late 1930s, against Hollywood.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the major Hollywood studios had consolidated their control over the American movie marketplace with a variety of anticompetitive practices that squeezed out both American independents and foreign producers alike. By the late 1930s, only a bare handful of British-made films were getting imported to America at all, and most of those were relegated to specialist theaters, unable to compete against domestic product on equal footing. Soon, the number of British films that were shown in America in any given year could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Whenever British producers attempted to criticize the trade practices that effectively barred their participation, the Hollywood industry responded that the fault lay exclusively with the poor quality of British films. In an effort to overcome this resistance, British filmmakers in the late 1930s and early 1940s increasingly attempted to consciously "Americanize" their films from the outset-choosing subject matter and stars based on what market research showed was most popular in the United States.
It was in this environment that, in 1940, Alfred Hitchcock left England to become a Hollywood filmmaker. Hitchcock was inarguably the most significant and commercially viable filmmaker in England, and to lose him to the Yanks was a major blow. Suddenly the pride of the British film industry was gone, and his latest creations were winning Oscars®, making fortunes, and helping crowd British productions even further into the margins.
Foreign Correspondent was Hitchcock's second American production, made in 1940 and released to enormous commercial and critical acclaim. If British filmmakers felt compelled to imitate Hollywood successes in order to try to break into the American market, copying this hit was only natural. It would be hard for British filmmakers to capture the alien cultural signifiers of films like Stagecoach or Gone with the Wind (both 1939), but Foreign Correspondent had been made by one of their own, and so its aesthetics should not be beyond their reach.
Indeed, The Avengers achieved that rare prize of getting distributed stateside, just a few months after its London premiere, distributed by Paramount Pictures. It was however relegated to the specialist arthouse venues in major cities that were home to so many British films before and after, and received scant attention.
Neither was it much of a commercial success in England, it must be said. The importance of its subject matter and artistic outlook to audiences at the time, however, can be measured in other ways. A year after The Avengers was released, Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (1943) would build an entire movie around material very similar to the thrilling last couple of reels of The Avengers, in which an occupied nation rallies its spirits to protect the identity of a resistance fighter against steadily increasing Nazi terror.
Although little remembered today, The Avengers is an effective thriller that showcases both the struggle of everyday Brits against the Nazi war machine, and British filmmakers against the dominance of Hollywood.
Producer: Paul Soskin
Director: Harold French
Screenplay: Frank Owen; Anatole de Grunwald, Patrick Kirwen, Terrence Rattigan (treatment and screenplay)
Cinematography: Bernard Knowles (uncredited)
Art Direction: William C. Andrews
Music: Richard Addinsell
Film Editing: Michael C. Chorlton
Cast: Hugh Williams (Colin Metcalfe), Griffiths Jones (Police Inspector Gunter), Deborah Kerr (Kari Alstad), Ralph Richardson (Frank Lockwood), Francis L. Sullivan (Kommandant Ulrich Wettau), Roland Culver (Cmdr. Pittwaters), Finlay Currie (Capt. Alstad), Niall MacGinnis (Olaf), Elizabeth Mann (Gerda), Patricia Medina (Ingrid), Roland Pertwee (Capt. Waverley, Naval Intelligence), Henry Oscar (Newspaper Editor), David Horne (Evans, Foreign Editor), Henry Hewitt (Jack, News Editor), John Warwick (Milligan, Reporter in Fleet Street Pub), Brefni O'Rorke (Political Journalist).
BW-99m.
by David Kalat
Sources:
Kerry Segrave, Foreign Films in America
Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939-1949
