Most film fans know The Mask of Dimitrios, the 1944 noir thriller directed by Jean Negulesco. Starring Peter Lorre, Faye Emerson, Zachary Scott, and Sydney Greenstreet, and based on the novel The Coffin of Dimitrios by rising star spy fiction writer Eric Ambler, it enjoyed moderate contemporary success only to grow in popularity in the succeeding years. Ambler, who had another famous screen adaptation a couple of years earlier when his novel Journey into Fear got the Orson Welles, er, I mean, Norman Foster treatment, was known for bringing a greater sense of realism to the genre than previously employed by spy fiction writers. It was this increasing sense of realism that brought him his greatest successes, thanks to the popularity of Dimitrios, and his collaboration with a director who perfectly suited Ambler’s sense of straightforward storytelling, Roy Ward Baker. Together, they created a spy thriller, Highly Dangerous, that stands out now as ahead of its time.
Their first effort together, The October Man, met with mixed reviews and only middling success at the box office. Starring John Mills, the story revolves around his character, Jim Ackland, suffering a severe head injury in a bus accident and then, later, becoming confused as to whether he’s responsible for the murder of a woman he met the previous night. It’s a mystery thriller that works well despite what Bosley Crowther said (he never really liked Ambler at all based on his reception of both this and Highly Dangerous). It was their second film together, however, that brought the spy film into new territory, territory it wouldn’t really return to for years to come and still not in quite the same way.
Highly Dangerous tells a tale of international intrigue from an angle not familiar to most 1950 movie viewers. First, the basic plot: The British government has learned that an Eastern European country (it’s not named but could be any number of Soviet satellite states in the early stages of the Cold War) is going to use insects as carriers of deadly viruses that they unleash upon the British people and, possibly, all of Western Europe. They have to stop it and enlist the best entomologist they have, Frances Gray (Margaret Lockwood), to travel there undercover and stop it before it starts. Right from the start, it feels different than other spy thrillers of the time, from the Saint series to Night Train to Munich (also starring Lockwood). The element of using deadly viruses spread by insect is exactly the type of spy plot element we might see today but, more importantly, it had the character of a non-professional spy used in the service of the government rather than training the spy to do the work of the expert (for instance, later, in spy thrillers like the James Bond series, Bond would be briefed on the bugs and the virus and be sent in to do the job). This is something that became more familiar in the Tom Clancy era with desk jockey Jack Ryan doing the ground work of the spy because of his expertise in the area of interest. And perhaps more than anything else, the expert they turn to is a woman and no one ever really calls any attention to that fact. There are no dated, sexist lines like, “We need the best man for this job! Why does it have to be a woman?”
Now, of course, Frances meets up with an American journalist, Bill Casey (Dane Clark) in this fictional police state but he’s so helpless and hapless, she remains the engine driving them forward. He keeps wanting to back out because it’s too dangerous while she grabs him by the arm and carries him along. And Ambler’s sense of banal realism somehow makes for more tension. The characters don’t have secret gadgets, no hidden weapons, no expert karate moves. What they do is plot and scheme and talk and analyze and, to the best of their ability, avoid the enemy and get the job done.
Lockwood had been in spy thrillers before (the great The Lady Vanishes and the aforementioned Night Train to Munich) but this one feels like it could be remade today with little to no changes. From the story to the characters and attitudes, it has a modern feel and thrust to it. All of this is helped along by an amazing cast. First and foremost, there’s Margaret Lockwood, excellent as always but doing something different here. She has to play a variety of characters, in a way. She has to be the loving aunt to her nephew (to keep her single and available to Dane Clark’s character, you see; nowadays they would simply make her a single mother), a straight forward, rational scientist, and an impassioned patriot, fighting for her country. She plays all splendidly well and carries the movie without a stumble.
The cast is rounded by Dane Clark, doing his best “Joe Average” (that’s what he called himself in real life), Naunton Wayne (also in The Lady Vanishes), sans his longtime acting buddy Basil Radford, and Marius Goring, known to most for his work in The Red Shoes. Here, he plays the sly and relentless head of the state police, pursuing Gray, knowing she’s a spy but waiting to catch her in the act.
Highly Dangerous isn’t as famous as Baker and Ambler’s third and final film together, the masterpiece A Night to Remember, because, hey, when you finish up with A Night to Remember, folks aren’t going to associate you with much else. But it’s a deft thriller with an eye towards the future. That future in spy thrillers got a little sidetracked but, eventually, the type of realistic spy thriller that Ambler did so well, along with his contemporary, Graham Greene, would be furthered by the likes of John le Carre, Robert Ludlum, and Tom Clancy. And Roy Ward Baker’s sense of intimate, no-frills storytelling worked well to make it so successful. Baker and Ambler only worked together three times but it was enough to make them a highly dangerous duo, or should I say, a duo to remember.