Sadly Over-hyped

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

"Contraband" is a Powell/Pressburger collaboration, and a lot of the techniques they use are reminiscent of later films, such as the 49th Parallel and "The Red Shoes."The story concerns a Dane, Captain Anderson (Conrad Veidt) on a freighter that is stopped for inspection by a British warship. He asks for passes for himself and his first officer, but when he is ready to leave, he finds that the passes have been stolen by two passengers, Mrs. Sorenson (Valerie Hobson) and Mr. Pidgeon (Esmond Knight). He rows to shore and finds Mrs. Sorenson and decides to stick to her like glue. Before long he's involved with a German spy ring.This is a good film with both Veidt and Hobson giving wonderful performances. They have good chemistry and the script gives them the opportunity for some repartee. The background of the movie is interesting. One message was to to elicit compassion from the Scandinavians, as they emerge here as the heroes. Obviously it was before Denmark was invaded, and the British hoped to have their help. The last scenes are quite exciting. This doesn't come up to a 39 Steps but it's still enjoyable.

I like WWII propaganda films. However, I also will admit that often they lack logic. Their intent was to rouse the folks watching it-- stirring their patriotic fervor, not their intellect. In the case of "Blackout", it's a pretty exciting film but completely illogical from start to finish.The film begins with a Danish* ship awaiting inspection by a British naval patrol. After all, WWII has begun and the Brits are just making sure nothing is getting in or out of the country that would help the Nazis. The Captain of the ship (Conrad Veidt) is cooperative and things seem just fine. However, and here's where the film starts to get stupid, a couple passes which would have allowed him and his first mate to go ashore suddenly go missing--and so do two passengers. Obviously the pair had taken the passes and went ashore. Now anyone with at least 1/2 ounce of brain would think to contact the British authorities to let them know. After all, the two might be German agents. But, since it's a propaganda film, the Captain and his mate sneak ashore and the Captain goes in search of the pair (don't worry, it's only London and it's not like it's one of the largest cities in the world!!! Finding them should be a snap). Does the Captain NOW find a cop or some other authority for help? Nah, he goes out and almost immediately tries to find them....and he DOES find the lady! She almost immediately tries to give him the slip--and yet he STILL does not seek police help!!! This is pretty much what happens throughout the rest of the film-- even when the Captain DEFINITELY discovers a Nazi spy ring. Why bother telling the police when you can take on a group like Nazi spies?! Illogical from start to finish but also find of exciting and fun.*This film is set in 1939--before the Germans took over Denmark. So, when the film occurred, the Danes were still neutral and not involved in the war.

This film, released both as CONTRABAND and as BLACKOUT, is a highly superior suspense and espionage film of the immediate pre-War period. The stars are Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson, and the chemistry between them is almost as good as that between Bogart and Bacall in CASABLANCA (1942, in which, by the way, Veidt also appeared). Little can anyone have realized when this film was made, but Veidt had very little time left to live. He dropped dead while playing golf in 1943 at the age of only 50. Veidt and his third wife, who was Jewish, fled Germany to escape the Nazis in 1933, and settled in England. Germany's loss was England and America's gain, for Veidt, as a famous German star, had an effortless magnetism and enormous talent on screen. He lent gravitas to many a shaky part. Here he plays a Danish ship's captain, thus excusing his accent, which was of course really a German one. But the English public had little familiarity with the Danes since the Danish Vikings departed several hundred years earlier, so they did not notice the difference. (Lots of very blond people in the north-east of England are what the Danish Vikings left behind.) In the film there is a large Danish restaurant called Viking in the middle of London, where people dress in white tie for dinner and eat lots of herrings and have exotic haute cuisine and excellent wines. I wonder if any such Scandinavian gastronomic outpost ever really existed in London at any time. For a passionate herring-lover like myself, if only! (The best way to cook a herring is Scottish-style. And I bet you don't get many recipes in IMDb reviews, but here goes. Dip it in milk, roll it in organic oatmeal, gently pan-fry it in a modicum of pheasant fat, or if you can't find any then use goose fat. Allow to become brown and crisp. After eating, skin and oats and all, have tranquillizers ready to help you recover from the ecstatic culinary experience. And that is enough food for today.) This film was made before Denmark was invaded by the Nazis, so there is a great deal of Danish patriotism on display, including all the waiters and the proprietor of the Viking joining up to help Veidt and singing a patriotic Danish song. Valerie Hobson plays Mrs. Soerensen, a British divorcée whose ex-husband is Danish. In reality, she is an intrepid British spy. Veidt's Danish ship on its way back to Denmark is diverted into harbour in Britain for contraband inspection, and Valerie Hobson and a spy accomplice steal Veidt's landing permits in order to make a dash for London on their secret business. Veidt is annoyed and chases after them, but has no British money with him, which means he cannot even pay for a taxi when he arrives in London. He and Hobson end up becoming entangled first in complex spy activities, being captured and tied up by Nazi spies in London, and then become romantically entangled as well because they are irresistibly attracted to one another. So the ingredient of romance, tinged with irony, runs through the action. Valerie Hobson really shines in this film. She was amazingly beautiful at that time and what is called 'an absolute charmer'. And she has the most intense bedroom eyes, to which Veidt is far from indifferent. This film featured a number of interesting early appearances and non-appearances. Deborah Kerr got her first job in a film playing a cigarette girl, but her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, which must have added to the attractiveness of the floor, if not to the elevation of the young actress's expectations. Leo Genn and Peter Bull, such sturdy stalwarts of the British film business over decades, appear in supporting roles. Countless of us knew Peter Bull from his astrology shop in Notting Hill Gate, where until his death in 1984, it was always amusing to go in and browse and engage him in conversation about all the old movies he had been in and hear his bombastic and witty exposes of the foibles of his colleagues and racy tales of calamities on the set and on location. He was never a shy person and relished being drolly gay. Bernard Miles fixes a pipe in this film and Milo O'Shea is an air raid warden, his first film appearance, and more fortunate than Deborah Kerr in that he was not cut out. The blackout scenes in London are very informative and interesting, being entirely accurate. One learns, for instance, that the traffic lights at night shone only through small crosses cut in the centres of the shades in front of the lights (this can be seen in a scene where Veidt and Hobson are crossing a street). The film is thus remarkably informative about the conditions of early wartime London, and thus has a considerable historical importance. For those who like shots of old naval ships, there are plenty of those to see steaming around. The snappy editing of this film is by John Seabourne, Senior, skills which were later to be used to heighten the eerie dramatic power of THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER (1949) in particular. He is certainly an under-appreciated talent of the period, who left the industry in 1959 (born in 1890, no date of death is recorded for him on IMDb) after editing 39 films, several of them classics such as I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING (1945) and A CANTERBURY TALE (1944). This film was directed by the talented Michael Powell and the original story and screenplay are by his Romanian/Hungarian/Jewish collaborator Emeric Pressburger. They would go on to make together 49th PARALLEL (1941, see my review), several films with the editor John Seabourne, and would become world famous with THE RED SHOES (1948), along with countless other films which are fundamental to British cinema history.

What a delightful film this is. It's true that this film is concocted out of the same ingredients of contemporary Hitchcock film - spy suspense and romance between stand offish lovers wrapped up in a crust of a comedy of manners but it's interesting to see the results from a different chef. There is even a climactic scene in a factory which makes busts of Neville Chamberlain. The little sexual mushrooms that Hitchcock likes to strew through his films are here even more perverse with particular emphasis on bondage and pain. Here is Conrad Veidt at his most affable and most romantic, hardly the same man who pisses ice cubes he was in Casablanca, his most indelible role. Valerie Hobson is the perfect combination of repressed middle class woman and devil may care adventuress. They have a brilliant chemistry together, sort of a neo-lithic Steed and Peel. It remains to be seen if any film today can ever capture this type of pairing, with the forthcoming MR. & MRS. SMITH (itself an old Hitchcock title) promising a cartoon like special effects and martial arts based attempt at mutual destruction. O tempes, o mores.The action can be a little more than the merely concocted. As in farce, people do certain things in certain ways, its seems, just to keep the story moving along. So there are massive plot holes. Its the old John Ford story, about why he didn't have the Indians simply shoot the horses in STAGECOACH (if they did there wouldn't be a movie!). There was another reason d'etre for CONTRABAND - wartime British propaganda. CONTRABAND was made with the co-operation of two British Government ministries including the Office of Economic Warfare. It would seem that one film's goals was to create a positive sympathy among Scandinavians by having the lions share of defeating the Nazi spy ring accomplished by the hereto neutral Danes handily recruited from a restaurant evocatively named The Viking. This British hope of support was before the German invasion of Denmark and the instantaneous crumbling of Danish military defenses. The climactic fight in the factory making heroic busts of Neville Chamberlain was not meant to be ironic (a bust is used to knock out a spy followed with a Bond like quip "They said he was tough."). It is doubtful that two government ministries would have co-operated with a film which made fun of the Prime Minister during wartime. In fact all Civil servants and serving military men are seen as competent, thoughtful efficient and humane. But all of these elements are held subtly in the background, as is a virtual encyclopedia of ordinary life in London, especially the demands of the blackout.However all these are subsidiary interests to the real focus of the film, the relationship between Veidt and Hobson. In many way this was a repackaging of their pairing in a previous Powell film, THE SPY IN BLACK, which ends, in romantic terms, unsatisfactorily, i.e. she goes back to her husband and he dies. Here they go on together, no doubt spending the next few years giving the Jerrys conniption fits, in and out of bondage. Oh yes. There is bondage, perhaps even freakier than in a Hitchcock film. There is no mistaking the B&D complete with a pillar.The good old days when you could get right to the edge and it would be read as merely the hero and heroine being tied up but no mistake, this is the real thing.