An early Hitchcock - not a terribly thrilling spy movie, it is interesting to watch a young Hitch (age 36) testing his visual storytelling language. The foreign mole, Mr Verloc, might be too obviously a villain, from his permanent scowl, piercing eyes, and heavy eyebrows, but I found Oskar Homolka compelling. Sylvia Sydney plays his American wife, who never really takes any agency in the story, unlike future Hitchcock women like Ingrid Bergman in
Notorious, but at least she doesn't embarrass herself. I had only seen Sydney in one other role, 50 years later, as a ghost bureaucrat in
Beetlejuice. John Loder plays the Scotland Yard detective on stakeout/undercover on Verloc's trail- it's not very suspenseful if the cops already know you're a spy before the movie begins! Loder talks in that cross-Atlantic 1930s Movie Voice like Cary Grant, like no one you ever knew in real life. Not a great movie, but Hitchcock's fingerprints are all over it, and he's on his way to greatness.
