A dictator begins a brutal conquest of Eastern Europe. His agents stage a covert campaign to manipulate the West into staying on the sidelines. Ghastly barbarism dominates the news. And yet many Americans are surprisingly apathetic to the rising crisis.
That may sound like geopolitics in 2024, but it also describes Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 spy thriller Foreign Correspondent. Starring Joel McCrea as journalist John Jones, it was just Hitchcock’s second Hollywood production after moving to the United States. Although it’s now one of the more neglected entries in the Hitchcock canon, the film is also an artful plea for Americans to recognize the calamity they faced in World War II. It was timely in 1940, and it remains full of enduring themes about the never-ending fight against tyranny.
Foreign Correspondent follows Jones on assignment to Europe in the opening days of the war, giving the audience a front-row seat to the breakdown of global order. As tyrants threaten to tear the world apart, Jones begins the film essentially ignorant of the great events roiling history. This is partly why Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport), his editor, prefers him to more seemingly erudite writers on staff. Jones does not have grand political theories or macroeconomic explanations or ideological formulae to bias his reporting on Europe. Instead, he is just a “good honest crime reporter”; in Powers’ mind that makes him the perfect person to report on the “crime hatching on that bedeviled continent.” Jones’ straightforward sense of right and wrong is his greatest asset.
Foreign Correspondent is a great action movie, but it is also a moving tribute to the power of the truth. In the film as in history, the Nazi antagonists employ blackmail, torture, and assassination to advance their wicked designs. Above all, they hide under a cloak of secrecy—a cloak that our intrepid journalist-heroes throw off to rouse the public. At its best, journalistic writing is a moral enterprise that requires an almost spiritual dedication to telling things like they are. The writer who seeks to capture contemporary events must unflinchingly address the terror of modern times.
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