Powell and Pressburger’s second collaboration, 1940’s Contraband (aka Blackout) is a knockabout knock-off of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps – two people yoked together against their will, a Nazi cell and so on – which also goes large on Hitchcock’s light-hearted energy and his fondness for a set piece.
Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson had both been in P&P’s first collaboration, the previous year’s The Spy in Black, and this time around play a couple charging around London under blackout conditions. She’s a spy who stole the shore passes issued to Veidt’s Captain Andersen, a Danish sea captain whose freighter has been impounded by the British authorities. He’s keen to get them back and to find out what his passenger, Hobson’s Mrs Sorensen, is up to.
Unlike The 39 Steps, the agency is really with the female character, but the situation is largely the same. Like Hitchcock, P&P are delivering nuggetty character sketches linked together by bits of action as Andersen and Sorensen make their way through a largely dark (but lively) London.
The war was still in its “phoney” stage (no nightly bombing yet) and the film fits the mood, with frivolity bubbling up from what should be a serious situation and the mood only darkening with the arrival of Van Dyne (Raymond Lovell) and the other members of the Nazi spy ring Mrs Sorensen has been tracking all along (not that Captain Andersen ever really believed her).
Mrs Sorensen is meant to be admirable rather than likeable and that’s how Hobson plays her, her usual starchiness giving a lift to her portrayal of a character who is steely, resolute and not to be trifled with.
Veidt gets his moment when Captain Andersen comes into his own later on. For the most part he is all old-world manners and plays the Captain as a decent sort who is slightly but graciously out of his depth. Both are excellent, and so is the supporting cast – Hay Petrie in two roles as the ship’s first mate and as the first mate’s “favourite” brother, a chef in London, and Esmond Knight as the chirpy geezer Mr Pidgeon, Mrs Sorensen’s fellow in spying.
There are nods to The 39 Steps all through, like the music-hall moment towards the end, and a set-piece shootout in a warehouse filled with busts of Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister whose appeasement of Hitler either bought the country time to re-arm or convinced the Nazis it was a soft touch.
Though the patriotic music swells here and there, newsreel style, for the most part Powell and Pressburger present the war as a clash of ideas rather than of countries. The only Nazis we see are, in fact, British fifth columnists, and much of the action takes place in a Danish restaurant where the Captain rouses his fellow Danes to take action. The only German accent heard is Veidt’s… and he’s meant to be Danish.
A new 35mm print of this film was presented at a Powell and Pressburger retrospective at the British Film Institute in 2024 but it hasn’t (as I write) made it onto streamers or Blu-ray, etc. A pity because what we currently have, a Kino Lorber release from 2001, is woolly, the tones have gone a bit and the whites are all bleaching out. It’s doubly a pity because the DP is the great Freddie Young and he’s doing interesting things with all those scenes set in the blackout – chiaroscuro images here and there, when Andersen and Sorensen are waving torches about, lots of foggy shadows elsewhere, with people (like the truth) only emerging gradually from the murk.
This is not Powell and Pressburger at their best but it is a great demonstration of their talents – brilliant writing and characterisation by Pressburger, fabulously energetic directing by Powell. They made some of their best films during the Second World War. Contraband is them warming up for their great run.
Contraband – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
