Anyone for the fifth best British film of 1936, as voted for by the readers of the defunct Film Weekly? Secret Agent is one of a run of spy thrillers Alfred Hitchcock made in the 1930s. Sandwiched between The 39 Steps and Sabotage it’s the least compelling of the three, a misfire in many ways. There are two reasons for that, both Hitchcock’s fault.
But let’s get to that later. First, you need to know that it stars John Gielgud as Edgar Brodie, a successful novelist recruited by the British secret service, given the spy moniker Ashenden (the title of the Somerset Maugham book on which the film’s based) and sent to Switzerland. There he is to meet up with fellow Brit Elsa Carrington (Madeleine Carroll) and a peculiar fellow called the General (Peter Lorre), a professional spy, assassin and hyperactive sex pest.
With Brodie and Carrington posing as Mr and Mrs Ashenden, and with the General buzzing about as some sort of decoy, the mission is to locate and kill the German agent who is working to turn the Arabs against the British in the First World War (Lawrence of Arabia spins on the same political axle), all the while keeping Mrs Ashenden out of the romantic claws of Robert Marvin (Robert Young), a fellow guest at the hotel.
The man and woman thrown together by circumstance is typical Hitchcock – The 39 Steps did the same, as did To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest (to name but three). And Carroll as the Hitchcock blonde is another familiar trope. As for the innocent man, another Hitchcock staple, that’s one of the reasons why things go wrong. In Secret Agent he’s not the hero, he’s the victim, and in a shock scene the film never recovers from the the three “goodies” conspire in the murder of a man who turns out to be the wrong guy.
Hitchcock goes to town on the assassination in a brilliant display of editing as a way of manipulating emotion, using the innocent man’s dog – who intuits that something is wrong – to elicit sympathy for the victim. It’s the best scene in the film, though it destroys the movie by alienating the audience from the guys they’re meant to be rooting for. But that’s the strange perversity of Hitchcock – killing the wrong person is something he also did in Sabotage (and regretted it) and again in Psycho.
The other problem is the casting of Gielgud – too diffident by half. Hitchcock had talked him into being in the movie, selling the Ashenden character as a modern-day Hamlet. Gielgud was never convinced and agreed with Hitchcock that the results were flat and undramatic. Stuck to some extent in his shadow, Madeleine Carroll doesn’t vibrate as she did in The 39 Steps, but she has her moments, particularly towards the end when her character’s conscience is bothering her, as well it might.
There is an argument to be made that, as in Psycho, Hitchcock is playing with his audience, taking the familiar waystations of the spy movie and flipping them – non-heroic heroes, dead innocents and so on. Which would make Secret Agent an arthouse movie, of sorts, as Vertigo has become. It’ll bear the weight of the thesis, but it doesn’t make it a better film.
That task falls almost entirely to Peter Lorre, who lays it on thick as the General, a gimlet-eyed exotic with an earring, a flower in his lapel and an eye for every lady he encounters. An early muttered aside from R, the London spy controller, suggests the General isn’t only interested in ladies, nudge nudge, which was fairly unusual for 1936. With wild overacting and lots of comedy business, Lorre saves the film. He gets the best lines and is clearly enjoying himself – at one point he mutters “You bet your sweet little ass,” to Ashenden, deploying an accent so thick it clearly zoomed past the censor.
There are technically virtuosic set pieces up a bell tower, on a factory production line and at a railway station where steam and crowds allow another target get away. It is all very, very Hitchcock. And yet it doesn’t quite work. Maybe we should turn to the top four in Film Weekly’s Best of 1936 list to fill the gap – The Ghost Goes West, Tudor Rose, Peg of Old Drury and The Passing of the Third Floor – or maybe not.
If I haven’t put you off, beware the crappy copies out there. Because it fell out of copyright any number of substandard DVD versions exist – fuzzy image and boxy sound, and that’s the good ones. Go for the ITV Studios or Filmedia versions if you can. They’re region 2 (ie not suited to most US machines) but until someone comes along with a digital restoration on a Blu-ray, they’re the best we have.
Secret Agent – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
