War is hell but also kind of fun in Confirm or Deny, one of a series of movies made by Hollywood when America was still a neutral power using emotional blackmail to counter isolationism and persuade the country to join the fray.
Eventually Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s insane decision to declare war on the USA would render films like this redundant, but in 1941 they were turning up regularly, all of them positioning the UK, Britain, England, call it what you like, as the home of a doughty breed, people just like its intended American audiences, who needed all the help they could get in their hour of need.
This is a remarkably breezy film with Don Ameche in the lead, as the likeable fast-talking wisecracking newspaperman Mitch Mitchell, a correspondent for the Consolidated Press in London trying to get a story about Hitler’s impending invasion of the British Isles from Blitz-besieged London back to readers in the USA.
Ex-newspaperman Sam Fuller co-wrote the story and there’s a smack of realism about certain details – the scarcity of telegraph bandwidth between the UK and USA, the frenzied atmosphere in the newsroom and the grace under pressure of reporters on a deadline. But Fuller and co-writer Henry Wales fall back on a well polished romance for the bulk of the movie – Mitch’s meet-cute with Joan Bennett’s teletype operator (handy!) in the blackout and their subsequent blossoming romance. Mitch cracks wise, American style, Jennifer fights shy, like the true Brit she is supposed to be.
They’re a good pairing, Ameche running his mouth at a clip and Bennett responding with a series of expressions ranging from starchy disapproval to mild amusement to faux outrage, all the while softening her body language as Jennifer weakens.
Around the edges a handful of Brits add pluck and comic grace notes – a 12/13-year-old Roddy McDowall as the precocious kid who distributes tea and his views on the war to the adults; Irish actor Arthur Shields (brother of Barry Fitzgerald) as a reporter bashing away furiously at a typewriter even though he’s blind; and, up on the roof, Mr Bindle (silent-movie veteran Billy Bevan), a walrus-moustached old timer who watches the skies for enemy attack and returning carrier pigeons – a vital link in the newsgathering chain. Later, the always excellent Eric Blore (like McDowall another Londoner) will turn up as the stuffy jobsworth making life difficult for Mitch and co after the Consolidated Press is forced to relocate to his hotel’s wine cellar.
Eventually Mitch’s “the story at any cost” attitude will run into a wall – the vital national interest – and he’ll be forced to come to a decision in which honour and glory face off, in the dark, with an unexploded bomb ticking away between him and his conscience, as Jennifer has now become.
The director is Archie Mayo, who took over from Fritz Lang, as would happen again on Lang’s next film, Moontide. Unlike Moontide, you can’t really see any traces of Lang here, or if you can Mayo has made them his own. Under his direction the film sings like a well-oiled sewing machine, Leon Shamroy’s lighting is smooth and plausible (he can really turn on the wows when he wants, but he understands it’s not appropriate here) and David Buttolph’s score also drives things forward unobtrusively.
Some scenes set on the London Underground to one side, it’s all fairly contained, a couple of exteriors and the rest shot in studios rigged out as a newspaper office or a wine cellar.
It’s not a great film but it is a very good one, an example of a bunch of talented people all doing their job and highly enjoyable, especially if you’re coming to it, as I did, not expecting too much. And it’s good propaganda too.
Confirm or Deny – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
