Espionage Agent ** (1939, Joel McCrea, Brenda Marshall, Jeffrey Lynn, George Bancroft) – Classic Movie Review 8020

A pleasant cast assembles for director Lloyd Bacon’s 1939 Espionage Agent, a once timely but now just low-voltage-seeming black and white paranoia espionage suspense thriller about Nazi spy rings taking over in the American heartlands just before World War Two.

Joel McCrea and Brenda Marshall star as US State Department spy agent Barry Corvall and Brenda Ballard his new wife, who at first he fears may be an enemy agent. They board a European train in Germany to gain the secret lowdown on the Nazis that is hidden aboard and to foil the plans of the Nazi spy Karl Mullen (Martin Kosleck). A briefcase has documents showing the Nazis have been infiltrating vital US industrial centres. 

Espionage Agent is entertaining enough, but the rather dull and uninspired direction by Bacon does not help some mild performances and the fairly timid script to spark up fully. However, it is short and pretty swift moving, and McCrea is his usual reliable self, while the film is significant historically, appearing as it did on 22 September 1939, the day after US President Franklin D Roosevelt signed the Neutrality Act.

Also in the cast are Jeffrey Lynn, George Bancroft, Stanley Ridges, James Stephenson, Nana Bryant, Martin Kosleck, Robert O Davis, Addison Richards, Howard Hickman, Edwin Stanley, William Hopper, Glenn Langan, Lionel Royce, Henry Victor, Lucien Prival, Chris-Pin Martin and John Harron.

Cast members in studio records who do not appear or are not identifiable include Lloyd Ingraham (Woodrow Wilson), Alex Melesh (head waiter), Eddie Acuff (taxi driver) and Mary Forbes.

Espionage Agent is directed by Lloyd Bacon, runs 84 minutes, is made and released by Warner Bros, is written by Robert Henry Buckner (story), Warren Duff, Michael Fessier and Frank Donaghue, is shot in black and white by Charles Rosher, is produced by Jack L Warner (in charge of production), Hal B Wallis (executive producer) and Louis F Edelman (associate producer), is scored by Adolph Deutsch, and is designed by Carl Jules Weyl.

Unlike other American studios that avoided upsetting foreign governments, Warner Bros identify the Germans as the enemy, four months after its anti-Nazi film Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

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© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 8020