Valerie Hobson

Contraband

by
Valerie Hobson in a hat and with a cigarette in her hand

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 … Read more

Werewolf of London

by
The wolfman in the lab

So here’s the world’s first feature-length werewolf movie, 1935’s Werewolf of London, which wasn’t particularly successful financially or critically but did get into the ether most of the nuts and bolts, the lore, of weremovies to come. It owes a tiny bit to Frankenstein – gentleman scientist interfering with the nature of things in a lab full or arcing electricity – and quite a lot to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which had been a huge hit four years earlier. Whole chunks of Werewolf‘s story appear to have been airlifted from the 1931 movie, in fact, something all the critics noticed and a few were not happy about. While searching for a rare … Read more

The Spy in Black

by
Captain Hardt with gun in hand

Known in the USA as U-Boat 29, The Spy in Black is the better and the original title of the first film made by the powerhouse pairing of director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger. If that was all it had to offer it would be worth a look. But it is also a tight and thrilling spy caper bubbling with a typical Powell and Pressburger humanity. It was made when the Second World War looked obvious and opened in the UK in 1939 as war was breaking out. Its star is Berlin-born Nazi-hating Conrad Veidt, who plays Ernst Hardt, a German U-Boat captain who arrives under cover of the night on a … Read more

Q Planes

by
Pilot Tony McVane in a plane talking to journalist Kay Hammond

Screw your eyes up a bit and don’t ask too many questions and you can just about see the outline of the James Bond franchise in 1939’s Q Planes, a breezy mix of spycraft, flirtatiousness, tech and eccentricity, all served up with the sort of crisp British diction you’d expect from a film made mostly in Denham Studios, home of Things to Come, Brief Encounter and Blithe Spirit. Another endpoint is the 1960s spytastic TV series The Avengers. Patrick Macnee admitted that he borrowed much of the character of mysterious brolly-carrying, hat-wearing spy Major John Steed from Ralph Richardson’s portrayal of mysterious brolly-carrying hat-wearing spy Major Charles Hammond. Hammond is introduced brilliantly in … Read more