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120-536: Foreign Correspondent is a 1940 American black-and-white spy thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock . It tells the story of an American reporter based in Britain who tries to expose enemy spies involved in a fictional continent-wide conspiracy in the prelude to World War II. It stars Joel McCrea and features 19-year-old Laraine Day , Herbert Marshall , George Sanders , Albert Bassermann , and Robert Benchley , along with Edmund Gwenn . Foreign Correspondent

240-479: A "total war" campaign to mobilise society for the war. As part of the "total war" campaign, the state warned people to be vigilant at all times for spies; alongside this campaign went a mania for spy stories, which likewise warned people to be vigilant against spies. Novels and films with a counterespionage theme became ubiquitous in Manchukuo from 1937 onward. Despite the intensely patriarchal values of Manchukuo,

360-408: A British ship to England. Amidst a furious storm, Jones proposes marriage to her, which she accepts. In England, they go to Carol's father's house, where Jones sees Krug ( Eduardo Ciannelli ), whom he recognizes from the windmill as the operative running the assassination and kidnapping. Fisher and Krug realize Jones knows too much, and Krug convinces Fisher that he must be killed. Fisher tells Jones he

480-412: A German destroyer. In 1972, in an interview with Dick Cavett , Hitchcock discussed some details of how the scene was created. Footage taken from a stunt aircraft diving over the ocean was rear-projected on rice paper in front of the cockpit set, while behind the rice paper were two chutes connected to large water tanks. The chutes were aimed at the windshield of the cockpit so that water would break through

600-579: A MI6 agent's attempts to uncover a mole in apartheid -era South Africa . Greene had worked as a MI6 agent in Freetown, an important British naval base during World War Two, searching for German spies who would radio information about the movements of ships to the Kriegsmarine , experiences which inspired The Heart of the Matter . Greene's case officer during World War Two was Harold "Kim" Philby, who

720-470: A Mossad spy in Greece. The book was published as a novel, but Roth insisted that the book was not a novel as he argued that the book was presented only as a novel in order to give it deniability. At the end of the book, the character of Philip Roth is ordered to publish the account as a novel, and it ends with Roth the character saying: "And I became quite convinced that it was my interest to do that...I'm just

840-753: A Pale Horse (1984). Manning Coles published Drink to Yesterday (1940), a grim story occurring during the Great War, which introduces the hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon . However, later novels featuring Hambledon were lighter-toned, despite being set either in Nazi Germany or Britain during the Second World War (1939–45). After the War, the Hambledon adventures fell to formula, losing critical and popular interest. The events leading up to

960-598: A Spy (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (US: A Coffin for Dimitrios , 1939), and Journey into Fear (1940) feature amateurs entangled in espionage. The politics and ideology are secondary to the personal story that involved the hero or heroine. Ambler's Popular Front –period œuvre has a left-wing perspective about the personal consequences of "big picture" politics and ideology, which was notable, given spy fiction's usual right-wing tilt in defence of establishment attitudes. Ambler's early novels Uncommon Danger (1937) and Cause for Alarm (1938), in which NKVD spies help

1080-699: A book later in 1969. In Seventeen Moments of Spring , the story is set in the Great Patriotic War as Isayev goes undercover, using the alias of a Baltic German nobleman Max Otto von Stierlitz to infiltrate the German high command. The plot of Seventeen Moments of Spring takes place in Berlin between January–May 1945 during the last days of the Third Reich as the Red Army advances onto Berlin and

1200-420: A certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries". On the review aggregator website  Rotten Tomatoes ,  Foreign Correspondent  has an approval rating of 96% based on 45 reviews, with an average score of 8.10/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent features a winning combination of international intrigue, comic relief, and some of

1320-406: A closed hotel where Van Meer is being held prisoner. He is captured at gunpoint and brought into the room where the spy ring is holding a drugged Van Meer, torturing him with bright lights and loud jazz music. Fisher fails to persuade Van Meer to reveal the details of a secret clause in a treaty, Clause 27 (the movie's MacGuffin ). Fisher then has Van Meer physically tortured until he begins to recite

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1440-458: A few films including Houseboat (1958), The Visit (1964), The Chase (1966) with Marlon Brando , and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), with Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani . Ciannelli was married to Alma Wolfe from 1918 until her death (1968). They had two sons, Eduardo and Lewis E. Ciannelli , who is also an actor. On 8 October 1969, Ciannelli died in Rome , and was interred in

1560-578: A field agent; he reprised the role in the sequel The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1987). Other important American authors who became active in spy fiction during this period include Robert Littell , The Defection of A. J. Lewinter (1973); James Grady , Six Days of the Condor (1974); William F. Buckley Jr. , Saving the Queen (1976); Nelson DeMille , The Talbot Odyssey (1984); W. E. B. Griffin ,

1680-464: A film that should be included on the master of suspense's top table." In 1941, Foreign Correspondent was nominated for six Academy Awards , but did not win any. Foreign Correspondent was named one of the 10 Best Films of 1940 by Film Daily . Foreign Correspondent was adapted to the radio program Academy Award Theater on July 24, 1946, with Joseph Cotten starring. Spy thriller Commentator William Bendler noted that "Chapter 2 of

1800-534: A good Mossadnik". Eduardo Ciannelli Eduardo Ciannelli (30 August 1888 – 8 October 1969) was an Italian baritone and character actor with a long career in American films, mostly playing gangsters and criminals. He was sometimes credited as Edward Ciannelli . Ciannelli was born in Lacco Ameno , on the island of Ischia , where his father, a doctor, owned a health spa . He studied surgery at

1920-642: A long-haired, hashish -smoking fop in the novels The Dolly Dolly Spy (1967), The Great Spy Race (1968), The Bang Bang Birds (1968) and Think, Inc. (1971); James Mitchell 's 'David Callan' series, written in his own name, beginning with Red File for Callan (1969); William Garner 's John Morpurgo in Think Big, Think Dirty (1983), Rats' Alley (1984), and Zones of Silence (1986); and Joseph Hone 's 'Peter Marlow' series, beginning with The Private Sector (1971), set during Israel's Six-Day War (1967) against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In all of these series

2040-444: A mixed Russian-Han heritage; the implication being that people of "pure" descent from one of the "five races" of Manchukuo would not betray it. In "A Mixed Race Woman", the villain initially appears to Mali, the eponymous character who has a Russian father and a Han mother, but she ultimately is revealed to be blackmailed by the story's true villain, the foreign spy Baoerdun, and she proves to be loyal to Manchukuo after all as she forces

2160-580: A moral human being, who remains sociable and kind to all people, including the citizens of the state that his country is at war with. Unlike Bond, Isayev is devoted to his wife who he deeply loves and despite spending at least ten years as a spy in Germany and having countless chances to sleep with attractive German women remains faithful towards her. Through Isayev is a spy for the NKVD as the Soviet secret police

2280-749: A more popular level, Leslie Charteris ' popular and long-running Saint series began, featuring Simon Templar, with Meet the Tiger (1928). Water on the Brain (1933) by former intelligence officer Compton Mackenzie was the first successful spy novel satire . Prolific author Dennis Wheatley also wrote his first spy novel, The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935) during this period. In the sham state of Manchukuo , spies often featured in stories published in its government-sponsored magazines as villains threatening Manchukuo. Manchukuo had been presented since its founding in 1931 as an idealistic Pan-Asian experiment, where

2400-729: A newspaper correspondent where he met Lansdale who appears in The Quiet American as Alden Pyle while the character of Thomas Fowler, a cynical, but goodhearted British journalist in Saigon was partly based on himself. MI6 was outraged by Our Man In Havana with its story of James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba, recruited to work for MI6 who bamboozles his employers by selling them diagrams of vacuum cleaners, which he persuades MI6 are really diagrams of Soviet missiles. MI6 pressed for Greene to be prosecuted for violating

2520-552: A nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor . His Hollywood career consists of close to 150 film and television appearances. Notable among these are Marked Woman (1937) with Bette Davis , Strange Cargo (1940) with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable , and perhaps his most famous role, as the fanatical Thuggee guru in Gunga Din (1939) with Cary Grant . In the 1940 serial Mysterious Doctor Satan , he played

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2640-449: A novel and the TV mini-series that has offended Westerners who are more accustomed to seeing spy stories via the prism of the fast-paced Bond stories is the way that Isayev spends much time interacting with ordinary Germans despite the fact these interactions do nothing to advance the plot and are merely superfluous to the story. However, the point of these scenes are to show that Isayev is still

2760-403: A perception for the colour of human beings: a swift, feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives. He knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the woods. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. He could collect their gestures, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and broken twig, or as a fox detects

2880-483: A photo of the Dutch diplomat – actually concealing a gun near the camera. He assassinates Van Meer. Jones runs after the shooter and ends up encountering Carol and a reporter friend of hers, Scott ffolliott ( George Sanders ). They give chase in his car. Outside the city, they seem to lose sight of the car they have been following, but Jones suspects that the assassin is hiding in a windmill. While Carol and ffolliott go for

3000-580: A plan: Jones will take Carol to Cambridge , and ffolliott will pretend she has been kidnapped, in order to force Fisher to divulge Van Meer's location. Carol agrees to go, thinking that the purpose of their trip is to protect John by getting him out of London. When she overhears John booking two adjoining rooms at an inn, she believes that Jones has tricked her into leaving London for a premarital sexual encounter. She returns home alone and earlier than ffolliott expected, foiling his attempt to extract Van Meer's location from her father. ffolliott then trails Fisher to

3120-518: A spy novel review column. Nevertheless, counting on the aficionado, publishers continued to issue spy novels by writers popular during the Cold War era, among them Harlot's Ghost (1991) by Norman Mailer . In the US, the new novels Moscow Club (1991) by Joseph Finder , Coyote Bird (1993) by Jim DeFelice, Masquerade (1996) by Gayle Lynds , and The Unlikely Spy (1996) by Daniel Silva maintained

3240-416: A telegram intended for ffolliott, telling him that Van Meer has recovered and identified Fisher as his kidnapper, Fisher realizes he will soon be captured and returned to England. He confesses his treasonous behavior to Carol, who already suspects the truth but promises to stand by him. Jones pleads with Carol to rekindle their affair. Seconds later, the aircraft is shelled by a German destroyer and crashes into

3360-579: A thinly disguised version of the CIA while posing as a journalist. Writing under the pen name Trevanian , Roger Whitaker published a series of brutal spy novels starting with The Eiger Sanction (1972) featuring an amoral art collector/CIA assassin who ostensibly kills for the United States, but in fact kills for money. Whitaker followed up The Eiger Sanction with The Loo Sanction (1973) and Shibumi (1979). Starting in 1976 with his novel Saving

3480-434: A tiny scale, at close range" and complained that he has seen too many "people cheated and misled, whole lives thrown away, people shot and in prison, whole groups and classes of men written off for nothing". Le Carré's middle-class hero George Smiley is a middle-aged spy burdened with an unfaithful, upper-class wife who publicly cuckolds him for sport. The American scholars Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen described Smiley as

3600-626: A very low status. One consequence of the French influence on Russian culture was that the subject of espionage was usually ignored by Russian writers during the Imperial period. Traditionally, the subject of espionage was treated in the Soviet Union as a story of villainous foreign spies threatening the USSR. The organisation established to hunt down German spies in 1943, SMERSH, was an acronym for

3720-543: Is a metaphysical thriller ostensibly based on the infiltration of an anarchist organisation by detectives, but the story is actually a vehicle for exploring society's power structures and the nature of suffering. The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes , created by Arthur Conan Doyle , served as a SpyHunter for the British government in the stories " The Adventure of the Second Stain " (1904), and " The Adventure of

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3840-501: Is going on in the "secret world" of intelligence-gathering affected both non-fiction and fiction books about espionage. The Cold War and the struggle between Soviet intelligence-known as the KGB from 1954 onward-vs. the CIA and MI6 made the subject of espionage a popular one for novelists to write about. Most of the spy novels of the Cold War were really action thrillers with little resemblance to

3960-505: Is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety. His fear makes him servile—he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. But this fear, this servility, this dependence had developed in Smiley

4080-407: Is in danger and offers a bodyguard to protect him. The bodyguard, Rowley ( Edmund Gwenn ), takes Jones to the top of Westminster Cathedral tower ostensibly to ditch anyone following them and to show Jones the view. Suddenly, the bodyguard tries to shove Jones off the tower, going over the side to his own death, instead. Jones and ffolliott are convinced that Fisher is a traitor, so they come up with

4200-439: Is usually considered the first American modern (glamour and dirt) spy thriller weighing action and reflection. Richard Helms , the director-general of the CIA from 1966 to 1973 loathed le Carré's morally grey spy novels, which he felt damaged the image of the CIA, and encouraged Hunt to write spy novels as a rebuttal. Helms had hopes that Hunt might write an "American James Bond" novel, which would be adopted by Hollywood and do for

4320-562: The Men at War series (1984–); Stephen Coonts , Flight of the Intruder (1986); Canadian-American author David Morrell , The League of Night and Fog (1987); David Hagberg , Without Honor (1989); Noel Hynd, False Flags (1990); and Richard Ferguson, Oiorpata (1990). The culture of Imperial Russia was deeply influenced by the culture of France, and traditionally spy novels in France had

4440-906: The University of Naples , and worked briefly as a doctor, but his love of grand opera and the dramatic stage won out and he became a successful baritone, singing at La Scala and touring Europe. He went to the United States from the Port of Naples as a first cabin saloon passenger on board the steamship San Guglielmo , which arrived at the Port of New York on 19 March 1914. In New York, he appeared on Broadway in Oscar Hammerstein II 's first musical Always You and later in Rose-Marie . He appeared in Theatre Guild productions in

4560-514: The "secrets" that he was selling them was merely information culled from the newspapers. The bumbling vacuum cleaner salesman Wormold in Our Man in Havana seems to been inspired by Herbert Greene. In The Human Factor , Greene portrayed MI6 again in a highly unsympathetic light, depicting the British government as supporting the apartheid regime of South Africa because it was pro-Western while

4680-455: The 1950s, inspired an even more popular series of films starting in 1962. The success of the Bond novels and films has greatly influenced popular images of the work of spies even though the character of Bond is more of an assassin than a spy. Despite the commercial success of Fleming's extravagant novels, John le Carré , himself a former spy, created anti-heroic protagonists who struggled with

4800-833: The Affair, which involved elements of international espionage, treason , and antisemitism , dominated French politics. The details were reported by the world press: an Imperial German penetration agent betraying to Germany the secrets of the General Staff of the French Army ; the French counter-intelligence riposte of sending a charwoman to rifle the trash in the German Embassy in Paris, were news that inspired successful spy fiction. At least two Sherlock Holmes stories have clear espionage themes. In The Adventure of

4920-915: The Anglo–American theft of a superior Soviet jet aeroplane. Other important British writers who first became active in spy fiction during this period include Ian Mackintosh , A Slaying in September (1967); Kenneth Benton , Twenty-fourth Level (1969); Desmond Bagley , Running Blind (1970); Anthony Price , The Labyrinth Makers (1971); Gerald Seymour , Harry's Game (1975); Brian Freemantle , Charlie M (1977); Bryan Forbes , Familiar Strangers (1979); Reginald Hill , The Spy's Wife (1980); and Raymond Harold Sawkins , writing as Colin Forbes, Double Jeopardy (1982). Philip Gooden provides an analysis of British spy fiction in four categories: professionals, amateurs, dandies and literary types. During

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5040-592: The Bruce-Partington Plans " (1912). In " His Last Bow " (1917), he served Crown and country as a double agent , transmitting false intelligence to Imperial Germany on the eve of the Great War. The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Orczy chronicled an English aristocrat 's derring-do in rescuing French aristocrats from the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution (1789–99). But

5160-649: The Cheka. The frequent name changes for the secret police made no impression with the Russian people who still call any secret policeman a Chekisty . Semichastny felt that the legacy of the Yezhovshchina ("Yezhovz times") of 1936-1939 had given the KGB a fearsome reputation that he wanted to erase as wanted ordinary people to have a more favorable and positive image of the Chekisty as the protectors and defenders of

5280-570: The FBI was as "coolly efficient super-cop" who always successful in performing his duties. The FBI director, J.E. Hoover , had long cultivated the American press and Hollywood to promote a favorable image of the FBI. In 1955, Edward S. Aarons began publishing the Sam Durell CIA "Assignment" series, which began with Assignment to Disaster (1955). Donald Hamilton published Death of a Citizen (1960) and The Wrecking Crew (1960), beginning

5400-519: The Hebrew Bible's Book of Joshua might count as the first Spy Story in world literature. (...) Three thousand years before James Bond seduced Pussy Galore and turned her into his ally against Goldfinger , the spies sent by General Joshua into the city of Jericho did much the same with Rahab the Harlot. " Spy fiction as a genre started to emerge during the 19th Century. Early examples of

5520-640: The Naval Treaty , Holmes recovers the text of a secret Naval Treaty between Britain and Italy, stolen by a daring spy. In His Last Bow , Holmes himself acts as a double agent , providing Germany with a lot of false information on the eve of WWI . The major themes of a spy in the lead-up to the First World War were the continuing rivalry between the European colonial powers for dominance in Asia,

5640-519: The Nazis grew more desperate. In 1973, Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny was turned into a television mini-series, which was extremely popular in the Soviet Union and turned the Isayev character into a cultural phenomena. The Isayev character plays a role in Russian culture, even today, that is analogous to the role James Bond plays in modern British culture. As aspect of Seventeen Moments of Spring , both as

5760-549: The Official Secrets Act, claiming that he revealed too much about MI6's methods in Our Man in Havana , but it decided against charging Greene out of the fear that prosecuting him would suggest the unflattening picture of MI6 in Our Man in Havana was based on reality. Greene's older brother, Herbert, a professional con-man had briefly worked as a spy for the Japanese in the 1930s before his employers realised that

5880-612: The Palestinians, against the backdrop of continuing Cold War tensions, and the increasing use of terrorism as a political tool. The end of the Cold War in 1991 mooted the USSR , Russia and other Iron Curtain countries as credible enemies of democracy, and the US Congress even considered disestablishing the CIA . Espionage novelists found themselves at a temporary loss for obvious nemeses . The New York Times ceased publishing

6000-489: The Queen , the conservative American journalist and former CIA agent William F. Buckley published the first of his Blackford Oakes novels featuring a CIA agent whose politics were the same as the author's. Blackford Oakes was portrayed as a "sort of an American James Bond" who ruthlessly dispatches villainous KGB agents with much aplomb. The first American techno-thriller was The Hunt for Red October (1984) by Tom Clancy . It introduced CIA deskman (analyst) Jack Ryan as

6120-589: The Red Menace, which was perceived as another "clash of civilizations". Spy fiction was dominated by British authors during this period, initially former intelligence officers and agents writing from inside the trade. Examples include Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) by W. Somerset Maugham , which accurately portrays spying in the First World War, and The Mystery of Tunnel 51 (1928) by Alexander Wilson whose novels convey an uncanny portrait of

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6240-786: The Second World War, and the War itself, continue to be fertile ground for authors of spy fiction. Notable examples include Ken Follett , Eye of the Needle (1978); Alan Furst , Night Soldiers (1988); and David Downing , the Station series, beginning with Zoo Station (2007). The metamorphosis of the Second World War (1939–45) into the Soviet–American Cold War (1945–91) gave new impetus to spy novelists. Atomsk by Paul Linebarger (later known as Cordwainer Smith ), written in 1948 and published in 1949, appears to be

6360-429: The Soviet Union instead of torturers and killers. As such, Semichastny encouraged the publication of a series of spy novels that featured heroic Chekisty defending the Soviet Union. It was also during Semichastny's time as KGB chairman that the cult of the "hero spies" began in the Soviet Union as publications lionised the achievements of Soviet spies such as Colonel Rudolf Abel, Harold "Kim" Philby, Richard Sorge and of

6480-598: The Soviet writer Yulian Semyonov published a novel set in the Russian Civil War featuring a Cheka agent Maxim Maximovich Isaуev as its hero. Inspired by its success, the KGB encouraged Semyonov to write a sequel, Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny ("Seventeen Moments of Spring"), which proved to one of the most popular Soviet spy novels when it was serialized in Pravda in January–February 1969 and then published as

6600-519: The United States at the dawn of the Battle of Britain , just three days after the Luftwaffe began bombing British coastal airfields in the early Adlerangriff phase of the Battle of Britain , and a week before Germany began bombing London on August 24. Foreign Correspondent did well at the box office, but its high cost meant it incurred a loss of $ 369,973. According to Kinematograph Weekly it

6720-404: The United States, where the achievements of Anglo-American intelligence during the Second World War were to a certain extent publicized soon after the war such as the fact that the Americans had broken the Japanese naval codes (which came out in 1946) and the British deception operation of 1943, Operation Mincemeat (which was revealed in 1953), there was nothing equivalent in the Soviet Union until

6840-427: The Western powers were betraying their values by supporting the white supremacist South African government. Much controversy ensued when shortly after the publication of The Human Factor it emerged that such a plan had in fact been carried out, which led to much speculation about whether this was a coincidence or whether Greene had more access to secret information than he let on. There was also much speculation that

6960-407: The actual work of spies. The writer Malcolm Muggeridge who had worked as a spy in World War Two commented that thriller writers in the Cold War took to writing about espionage "as easily as the mentally unstable become psychiatrists or the impotent pornographers". The city that was considered to be the "capital of the Cold War" was Berlin, owing to its post-war status as the city was divided between

7080-476: The amateur protagonist survive, are especially remarkable among English-language spy fiction. Above Suspicion (1939) by Helen MacInnes , about an anti-Nazi husband and wife spy team, features literate writing and fast-paced, intricate, and suspenseful stories occurring against contemporary historical backgrounds. MacInnes wrote many other spy novels in the course of a long career, including Assignment in Brittany (1942), Decision at Delphi (1961), and Ride

7200-544: The announcement that their keynote speaker, Van Meer, has taken ill and won't appear. In his stead, the host has his daughter, Carol, speak. Jones realizes he has inadvertently insulted the woman he now adores. The newspaper editor, Powers, sends Jones on to Amsterdam to cover Van Meer's next appearance, at a conference of the Universal Peace Party. When Jones stops to greet Van Meer outside the conference hall, Van Meer seems to be in some kind of hypnotic state and does not recognize him. Suddenly, an eager photographer moves to take

7320-424: The book's protagonist, the MI6 officer Maurice Castle, married to a black South African woman, provides information to the KGB to thwart MI6 operations. Much of the plot of The Human Factor concerned a secret plan by the British, American and West German governments to buy up South African gold in bulk in order to stabilise the economy of South Africa , which Greene presented as fundamentally amoral, arguing that

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7440-678: The character of Maurice Castle was inspired by Philby, but Greene consistently denied this. Other novelists followed a similar path. Len Deighton 's anonymous spy protagonist of The IPCRESS File (1962), Horse Under Water (1963), Funeral in Berlin (1964), and others, is a working-class man with a negative view of " the Establishment ". Other notable examples of espionage fiction during this period were also built around recurring characters. These include James Mitchell 's 'John Craig' series, written under his pseudonym 'James Munro', beginning with The Man Who Sold Death (1964); and Trevor Dudley-Smith 's Quiller spy novel series written under

7560-459: The clause, which would be triggered if Germany goes to war. ffolliot starts to fight Fisher's thugs to interrupt Van Meer, and then escapes. Jones and a fellow reporter arrive, and the three rescue Van Meer. Fisher flees. Van Meer is taken to a nearby hospital, where he slowly regains consciousness. Britain and France declare war on Germany. Jones and ffolliott follow the Fishers onto a Short S.30 Empire flying boat to America. When Fisher intercepts

7680-487: The counter-spy campaign targeted women who were encouraged to report anyone suspicious to the police with one slogan saying, "Women defend inside and men defend outside". The spy stories of Manchukuo such as "A Mixed Race Woman" often had female protagonists. In "A Mixed Race Woman", it is two ordinary women who break up the spy ring instead of the Manchukuo police as might be expected. The South Korean scholar Bong InYoung noted stories such as "A Mixed Race Woman" were part of

7800-577: The early 1960s. Soviet novels prior to the 1960s to the extent that espionage was portrayed at all concerned heroic scouts in the Red Army who during the Great Patriotic War as the war with Germany is known in the Soviet Union who go on dangerous missions deep behind the Wehrmacht's lines to find crucial information. The scout stories were more action-adventure stories than espionage stories proper and significantly always portrayed Red Army scouts rather than Chekisty ("Chekists") as secret policemen are always called in Russia as their heroes. The protagonists of

7920-515: The eponymous villain, an evil scientist with an army of robots. In the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he divided his time among Italian films such as The City Stands Trial , directed by Luigi Zampa , Attila (1954) with Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren , Helen of Troy (1956), appearances in American TV shows such as Climax Mystery Theater , The Time Tunnel , Perry Mason , Alfred Hitchcock Presents , Johnny Staccato , The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor , Dr. Kildare and

8040-426: The espionage novel are The Spy (1821) and The Bravo (1831), by American novelist James Fenimore Cooper . The Bravo attacks European anti- republicanism , by depicting Venice as a city-state where a ruthless oligarchy wears the mask of the "serene republic". In nineteenth-century France, the Dreyfus Affair (1894–99) contributed much to public interest in espionage . For some twelve years (ca. 1894–1906),

8160-431: The ethical issues involved in espionage and sometimes resorted to immoral tactics. Le Carré depicted spies as living a morally grey world having to constantly make morally dubious decisions in an essentially amoral struggle where lies, paranoia and betrayal are the norm for both sides. In le Carré best known novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963), the hero Alec Leamas views himself as serving in "...a war fought on

8280-428: The fictional spy most likely to be successful as a real spy, citing le Carré's description of him in A Murder of Quality : "Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colorful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation

8400-426: The film ended with disillusioned British spy Alec Leamas and his lover, the naïve young woman Liz Gold being shot down while trying to cross the Berlin Wall from East Berlin into West Berlin. With Secret Ministry (1951), Desmond Cory introduced Johnny Fedora , the secret agent with a licence to kill , the government-sanctioned assassin . Ian Fleming , a former member of naval intelligence, followed swiftly with

8520-440: The film wrapped, Hitchcock visited his native England, and returned to Los Angeles on July 3, to report that the Germans were expected to begin bombing London at any time. To accommodate this, Ben Hecht was called in to write the epilogue of the film, the scene in the radio station, which replaced the original end sequence in which two of the characters discussed the events of the film on a transatlantic seaplane trip. The new ending

8640-582: The finished film. It was based on Vincent Sheean 's political memoir Personal History (1935), the rights to which were purchased by producer Walter Wanger for $ 10,000. The film was one of two Hitchcock films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1940, the other being Rebecca , which went on to win the award. Foreign Correspondent was nominated for six Academy Awards, including one for Albert Bassermann for Best Supporting Actor , but did not win any. In mid-August 1939, just before

8760-408: The first espionage novel of the dawning conflict. The "secret world" of espionage allowed a situation when writers could project anything they wanted onto the "secret world". The author Bruce Page complained in his 1969 book The Philby Conspiracy : "The trouble is that a man can hold almost any theory he cares to about the secret world, and defend it against large quantities of hostile evidence by

8880-537: The first head of the Secret Intelligence Service , Mansfield Smith-Cumming , the original 'C'. In the book Literary Agents (1987), Anthony Masters wrote: "Ashenden's adventures come nearest to the real-life experiences of his creator"'. John Le Carré described Ashenden stories as a major influence on his novels as praised Maugham as "the first person to write anything about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality". At

9000-659: The glamorous James Bond , secret agent 007 of the British Secret Service, a mixture of counter-intelligence officer, assassin and playboy. Perhaps the most famous fictional spy, Bond was introduced in Casino Royale (1953). After Fleming's death the franchise continued under other British and American authors, including Kingsley Amis , Christopher Wood , John Gardner , Raymond Benson , Sebastian Faulks , Jeffery Deaver , William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz . The Bond novels, which were extremely popular in

9120-650: The growing threat of conflict in Europe, the domestic threat of revolutionaries and anarchists, and historical romance. Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling concerns the Anglo – Russian " Great Game ", which consisted of a geopolitical rivalry and strategic warfare for supremacy in Central Asia , usually in Afghanistan . The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad examines the psychology and ideology motivating

9240-401: The gun out of Baoerdun's hand at the story's climax. However, Ding's story also states that Baoerdun would not dare to have attempted his blackmail scheme against a Han woman and that he targeted Mali because she was racially mixed and hence "weak". When Japan invaded China in 1937 and even more so in 1941, the level of repression and propaganda in Manchukuo was increased as the state launched

9360-594: The heroic Scotsman Richard Hannay . In France Gaston Leroux published the spy thriller Rouletabille chez Krupp (1917), in which a detective, Joseph Rouletabille , engages in espionage. After the Russian Revolution (1917) , the quality of spy fiction declined, perhaps because the Bolshevik enemy won the Russian Civil War (1917–23). Thus, the inter-war spy story usually concerns combating

9480-495: The image of the CIA what Fleming's Bond novels did for the image of MI6. In the 1970s, former CIA man Charles McCarry began the Paul Christopher series with The Miernik Dossier (1973) and The Tears of Autumn (1978), which were well written, with believable tradecraft. McCarry was a former CIA agent who worked as an editor for National Geographic and his hero Christopher likewise is an American spy who works for

9600-851: The late 1920s, co-starring with the Lunts ( Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne ), and Katharine Cornell . During that period, he appeared in Uncle Vanya , The Inspector General , and The Front Page . In 1935, he played Trock Estrella in Maxwell Anderson 's Winterset on Broadway and repeated his performance in the film version (1936). He played Cauchon in Shaw 's Saint Joan in 1936, after which he left Broadway permanently, except for one notable occasion when he returned to play in Dore Schary 's play The Devil's Advocate in 1961 and receive

9720-626: The lead roles, but Cooper was not interested in doing a thriller at the time, and Selznick would not loan out Fontaine. Later, Cooper admitted to Hitchcock that he had made a mistake in turning down the film. Working titles for the film, which began production on March 18, 1940, and initially finished on June 5, were Personal History and Imposter . Shooting took place at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio in West Hollywood , and on location around Los Angeles and Long Beach . After

9840-427: The legendary director's most memorable set pieces." On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, the film has a score of 89 out of 100 based on 18 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". In his 2012 review, Saptarshi Ray of The Guardian wrote of Foreign Correspondent : "a breathless yarn with the most serious of intents that soars well beyond mediocrity but just below genius, yet remains

9960-478: The local concerns in order to defeat the Communists until the modernization process was completed. The Nick Carter-Killmaster series of spy novels, initiated by Michael Avallone and Valerie Moolman, but authored anonymously, ran to over 260 separate books between 1964 and the early 1990s and invariably pitted American, Soviet and Chinese spies against each other. With the proliferation of male protagonists in

10080-475: The men and women who served in the Rote Kapelle spy network. Seeing the great popularity of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels in Britain and the United States, Soviet spy novels of the 1960s used the Bond novels as inspiration for both their plots and heroes, through Soviet prurience about sex ensured that the Chekisty heroes did not engage in the sort of womanising that Bond did. The first Bond-style novel

10200-532: The most widely read and most successful British writers of spy fiction, especially of invasion literature. Their prosaic style and formulaic stories, produced voluminously from 1900 to 1914, proved of low literary merit . During the War, John Buchan became the pre-eminent British spy novelist. His well-written stories portray the Great War as a "clash of civilisations" between Western civilization and barbarism . His notable novels are The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and sequels, all featuring

10320-424: The novel La Mal Jaune (1965) by the French writer Jean Lartéguy . The Ugly American was written as a rebuttal to The Quiet American under which the idealistic Colonel Barnum operating in the fictional Vietnam-like Southeast Asian nation of Sarkhan shows the way to defeat Communist guerillas by understanding local people in just the same way that Lansdale with his understanding and sympathy for ordinary Filipinos

10440-409: The ocean. The survivors perch on the floating wing of the downed aircraft. Realizing that the wing cannot support everyone, Fisher slips into the ocean to drown, dying for his cause while also sacrificing himself so the rest will survive. An American ship rescues the survivors. The captain refuses to allow the reporters to file their stories using the ship's communications, citing American neutrality in

10560-408: The officially designated "five races" of the Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchus, Koreans and Mongols had come together to build a utopian society. Manchukuo also had a substantial Russian minority who initially been considered as the "sixth race", but had been excluded. The spy stories of Manchukuo such as "A Mixed Race Woman" by the writer Ding Na often linked the willingness to serve as spies with having

10680-482: The outbreak of World War   II, the editor of the New York Morning Globe , Mr. Powers ( Harry Davenport ), sends crime reporter John Jones, using the pen name "Huntley Haverstock" ( Joel McCrea ), to Europe to report on conditions there. Jones's first assignment is to interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer ( Albert Bassermann ), at a luncheon. Jones/Haverstock shares a cab with Van Meer on

10800-653: The police, Jones searches the windmill and finds Van Meer alive, but heavily drugged. All Van Meer can manage to convey is that the man shot in front of witnesses earlier was an imposter. Jones narrowly escapes the windmill to tell the police that Van Meer is alive. When they all return to the scene with authorities, Van Meer and his kidnappers are gone. Later, back at Jones's hotel room in Amsterdam, two spies posing as police officers arrive to kidnap him. When he suspects who they really are, he escapes out of his hotel bathroom window. He runs into Carol again. Jones and Carol board

10920-475: The possibility of war. A fictional nation is mentioned numerous times however, possibly indicating that it was briefly considered as a potential proxy aggressor European country rather than an actual Axis nation. One of the sequences in the film that continues to have a strong effect on viewers is the William Cameron Menzies -designed mid-ocean crash of the flying boat after it is shot down by

11040-1076: The pseudonym 'Adam Hall', beginning with The Berlin Memorandum (US: The Quiller Memorandum , 1965), a hybrid of glamour and dirt, Fleming and Le Carré; and William Garner 's fantastic Michael Jagger in Overkill (1966), The Deep, Deep Freeze (1968), The Us or Them War (1969) and A Big Enough Wreath (1974). Other important British writers who first became active in spy fiction during this period include Padraig Manning O'Brine , Killers Must Eat (1951); Michael Gilbert , Be Shot for Sixpence (1956); Alistair MacLean , The Last Frontier (1959); Brian Cleeve , Assignment to Vengeance (1961); Jack Higgins , The Testament of Caspar Schulz (1962); and Desmond Skirrow , It Won't Get You Anywhere (1966). Dennis Wheatley 's 'Gregory Sallust' (1934-1968) and 'Roger Brook' (1947-1974) series were also largely written during this period. Notable recurring characters from this era include Adam Diment 's Philip McAlpine as

11160-538: The rice paper at the right moment, simulating the crash of the aircraft into the ocean. However, during the crash sequence, studio lights can briefly be seen. Hitchcock's eccentric marriage proposal to his wife Alma was written for this film, for the scene when Jones proposes to Carol. Foreign Correspondent opened on August 16, 1940, in the United States and on October 11 of that year in the United Kingdom. The film, which ends with London being bombed, opened in

11280-497: The scout stories always almost ended being killed at the climax of the stories, giving up their lives up to save the Motherland from the German invaders. In November 1961, Vladimir Semichastny became the chairman of the KGB and sent out to improve the image of the Chekisty . The acronym KGB ( Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti -Committee of State Security) was adopted in 1954, but the organisation had been founded in 1917 as

11400-731: The series featuring Matt Helm , a CIA assassin and counter-intelligence agent. Major General Edward Lansdale , a charismatic intelligence officer who was widely credited with having masterminded the defeat of the Communist Huk rebellion in the Philippines inspired several fictional versions of himself. Besides for The Quiet American , he appeared as Colonel Edwin Barnum in The Ugly American (1958) by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick and as Colonel Lionel Teryman in

11520-573: The signs of danger". Like Le Carré, former British Intelligence officer Graham Greene also examined the morality of espionage in left-wing, anti-imperialist novels such as The Heart of the Matter (1948), set in Sierra Leone , the seriocomic Our Man in Havana (1959) occurring in Cuba under the regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista before his deposition in the Cuban Revolution (1953–59), and The Human Factor (1978) about

11640-465: The simple expedient of retreating behind further and further screens of postulated inward mystery. Secret services have in common with Freemasons and mafiosi that they inhabit an intellectual twilight-a kind of ambiguous gloom in which it is hard to distinguish with certainty between the menacing and the merely ludicrous. In such circumstances the human affinity for myth and legend easily gets out of control". This inability to know for certain about what

11760-676: The socially marginal men and women of a revolutionary cell. A diplomat from an unnamed (but clearly Russian) embassy forces a double-agent, Verloc, to organise a failed attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory in the hope that the revolutionaries will be blamed. Conrad's next novel, Under Western Eyes (1911), follows a reluctant spy sent by the Russian Empire to infiltrate a group of revolutionaries based in Geneva . G. K. Chesterton 's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

11880-476: The spy fiction genre, writers and book packagers also started bringing out spy fiction with a female as the protagonist. One notable spy series is The Baroness , featuring a sexy female superspy, with the novels being more action-oriented, in the mould of Nick Carter-Killmaster. Other important American authors who became active in spy fiction during this period include Ross Thomas , The Cold War Swap (1966). The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971) by Robert Ludlum

12000-461: The spy novel in the post– Cold War world. Other important American authors who first became active in spy fiction during this period include David Ignatius , Agents of Innocence (1997); David Baldacci , Saving Faith (1999); and Vince Flynn , with Term Limits (1999) and a series of novels featuring counter-terrorism expert Mitch Rapp. In 1993, the American novelist Philip Roth published Operation Shylock , an account of his supposed work as

12120-458: The state's campaign to take over "...the governance of private and family life, relying on the power of propaganda literature and the nationwide mobilization of the social discourse of counterespionage". At the same time, she noted "A Mixed Race Woman" with its intelligent female protagonists seemed to challenge the patriarchal values of Manchukuo which portrayed women as the weaker sex in need of male protection and guidance. However, Bong noted that

12240-412: The story to stray significantly from the book. It took numerous writers and five years before Wanger had a script he was satisfied with, by which time Hitchcock was in the United States under contract with David O. Selznick and available to direct this film on a loan-out. Hitchcock, who did not enjoy working under the usual close scrutiny of Selznick, originally wanted Gary Cooper and Joan Fontaine for

12360-522: The street in London; Hitchcock walks past reading a newspaper. Albert Bassermann, who plays Van Meer, was German and did not speak English, so he had to learn all his lines phonetically. Likewise, one supposedly Dutch girl in the film speaks Dutch phonetically, though less convincingly. Producer Walter Wanger bought the rights to journalist Vincent Sheean 's memoir Personal History in 1935, but after several adaptations proved unsatisfactory, Wanger allowed

12480-558: The term "spy novel" was defined by The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Irish author Erskine Childers . The Riddle of the Sands described two British yachtsman cruising off the North Sea coast of Germany who turned amateur spies when they discover a secret German plan to invade Britain. Its success created a market for the invasion literature subgenre, which was flooded by imitators. William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim became

12600-471: The true heroine of "A Mixed Race Woman", Shulan is presented as superior to Mali as she is Han and the story is one "...of female disempowerment in that Mali is completely subordinate to the racial order Shulan sets". The growing support of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain , and the imminence of war, attracted quality writers back to spy fiction. British author Eric Ambler brought a new realism to spy fiction. The Dark Frontier (1936), Epitaph for

12720-411: The two German states while Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States all had occupations zones in Berlin. As a result, Berlin was a beehive of espionage during the Cold War with the city full of American, British, East German, French, Soviet and West German spies; it was estimated that there was an average of about 8,000 spies in Berlin at any given moment during the Cold War. Because Berlin

12840-570: The war E. Howard Hunt wrote his first spy novel, East of Farewell (1943). In 1949 he joined the recently created CIA and continued to write spy fiction for many years. Paul Linebarger , a China specialist for the CIA, published Atomsk , the first novel of the Cold War, in 1949. During the 1950s, most of American spy stories were not about the CIA, instead being about agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who tracked down and arrested Soviet spies. The popular American image of

12960-435: The war. Still, Jones, ffolliott, and Carol surreptitiously communicate the story by radio-telephone to Mr. Powers. Jones returns to England and, with Carol at his side, becomes a successful war correspondent. During a live radio broadcast, he describes London being bombed, urging Americans to "keep those lights burning" as they go dark in the studio. Alfred Hitchcock can be seen when Joel McCrea first spots Van Meer on

13080-444: The wartime slogan Smert shpionam! ("Death to Spies!"), which reflected the picture promoted by the Soviet state of spies as a class of people who deserved to be killed without mercy. The unfavorable picture of spies ensured that before the early 1960s there were no novels featuring Soviet spies as the heroes as espionage was portrayed as a disreputable activity that only the enemies of the Soviet Union engaged in. Unlike in Britain and

13200-489: The way to the luncheon. He peppers him with questions about the impending war, but Van Meer evades answering. Once at the event, Jones becomes smitten with Carol ( Laraine Day ) who has some uncertain role at the meeting. He invites her to sit at his table saying none of the reporters will listen to the speeches. A charming host, Stephen Fisher ( Herbert Marshall ), the leader of the Universal Peace Party, makes

13320-490: The writing is literary and the tradecraft believable. Noteworthy examples of the journalistic style and successful integration of fictional characters with historical events were the politico-military novels The Day of the Jackal (1971) by Frederick Forsyth and Eye of the Needle (1978) by Ken Follett . With the explosion of technology, Craig Thomas , launched the techno-thriller with Firefox (1977), describing

13440-596: Was The Zakhov Mission (1963) by the Bulgarian writer Andrei Gulyashki who had commissioned by Semichastny and was published simultaneously in Russian and Bulgarian. The success of The Zakhov Mission led to a follow-up novel, Zakhov vs. 007 , where Gulyashki freely violated English copyright laws by using the James Bond character without the permission of the Fleming estate (he had asked for permission in 1966 and

13560-414: Was Hitchcock's second Hollywood production after leaving the United Kingdom in 1939 (the first was Rebecca ) and had an unusually large number of writers: Robert Benchley , Charles Bennett , Harold Clurman , Joan Harrison , Ben Hecht , James Hilton , John Howard Lawson , John Lee Mahin , Richard Maibaum , and Budd Schulberg , with Bennett, Harrison, Hilton and Benchley the only writers credited in

13680-471: Was a center of espionage, the city was frequently a setting for spy novels and films. Furthermore, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 made the wall into a symbol of Communist tyranny, which further increased the attraction for Western writers of setting a Cold War spy novel in Berlin. Perhaps the most memorable story set in Berlin was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold which in both the novel and

13800-438: Was credited with defeating the Communist Huk guerrillas. The Ugly American was greatly influenced by the modernization theory, which held Communism was something alike to a childhood disease as the modernization theory held that as Third World nations modernized that this created social-economic tensions which a ruthless minority of Communists exploited to seize power; what was required from the United States were experts who knew

13920-513: Was denied). In Zakhov vs. 007 , the hero Avakoum Zakhov defeats James Bond, who is portrayed in an inverted fashion to how Fleming portrayed him; in Zakhov vs. 007 , Bond is portrayed as a sadistic killer, a brutal rapist and an arrogant misogynist, which stands in marked contrast to the kindly and gentle Zakhov who always treats women with respect. Zakhov is described as a spy, he more of a detective and unlike Bond, his tastes are modest. In 1966,

14040-489: Was filmed on July 5, presciently foreshadowing the celebrated radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow . Although many critics and film historians claim that neither Germany nor Hitler is named specifically in the film, both the man and the nation are indeed mentioned, including a scene where the name Germany is spelled out in the headline of a newspaper being hawked in the street and, while being given his assignment, Joel McCrea suggests an interview with Hitler, to get his views on

14160-530: Was known from 1934 to 1946, it is stated quite explicitly in Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny (which is set in 1945) that he left the Soviet Union to go undercover in Nazi Germany "more than ten years ago", which means that Isayev was not involved in the Yezhovshchina . The June 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbours introduced new themes to espionage fiction - the conflict between Israel and

14280-477: Was later revealed in 1963 to be a long time Soviet spy, who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence in the early 1930s while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Greene's best known spy novel The Quiet American (1955), set in 1952 Vietnam featured a thinly disguised version of the real American intelligence officer, Major General Edward Lansdale as the villain. Greene had covered the Vietnam war in 1951-52 as

14400-480: Was the second most popular film of 1940 in Britain (the first being Rebecca ). It earned £118,519 in the UK. It was generally praised by the critics, although some saw it as a glorified B movie . It also attracted attention from at least one professional propagandist, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels , who called Foreign Correspondent "a masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which no doubt will make

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