FACTS ON THE SCREEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 14, 17 July 1939, Page 4

FACTS ON THE SCREEN

"CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI

SPY"

Taking the revelations of the sensational German spy case of last year, Warner Bros.-First National have produced a film which is a direct attack on the German Government, on its system of espionage and its political philosophy, and the result may now be seen at the St. James Theatre, where this remarkable movie is being shown. The film play is submitted as a documentary film rather than as fiction or entertainment, and it may be said, for those who are without knowledge of the spy trials in which officers of the German Government were indicted in their absence, that the general outline of the story follows the disclosures in the spy case, that utterances which purport to reveal Nazi philosophy do reveal it and that even such apparent excursions into fiction as the fact that a key witness is too sick to come ashore from a

German liner after his flight from the United States is no more than the truth. The effect is enhanced by the technique employed. The film gets down to business at once, there are no credit titles and no cast given, and the figure of an announcer recalling the plot prepares the way for the sensational disclosures which follow. These disclosures are made by use of a first-rate cast, including Edward G. Robinson, Paul Lukas, Francis Lederer, George Sandei-s, and Henry O'Neill, and a hundred others splendidly chosen and fitting the personalities given them to perfection. From time to time, as the film advances, use is made of newsreels, of shots of Hitler and Nazi leaders in action with true fanaticism, and of German troops on the march. And as tho action proceeds it is linked together by comments and explanations of the announcer. The result is a film which has been greeted with cheers in the United States and which, here also, provokes loud applause at such moments as the round-up of the Gestapo men. ' Incredible as it may appear, there is no more than the truth in. the representation of a captain of a German liner taking orders from secret police on his ship, or in the organisation of the Nazi camps in the United States and the busy gathering of military information about a Power on the other side of the Atlantic. Nor are the methods employed by the spies mere fiction; there really was a plot to kidnap an American officer in the'attempt to steal, mobilisation plans from him.

The impact of a film such as this one is tremendous. It has the shock ol! a personal accident, and it brings home the new and dynamic imperialism of the Fourth Reich. The aim of the attack on the new world, even, is plausibly stated. It is, according to tlie producers, to immobilise the United States so that Germany may gain dominance in tho rich South American market in which the Roosevelt trade policy is crowding her to the wall. The suggestion, it seems, is that the creation of a first-class internal problem for the Americans at home by raising a powerful movement which will attack the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, those systems of democratic rights which the Nazis despise, will have the result of absorbing all her energies while Germany reaps the benefit. There has never been a film like this before, a direct and powerful attack upon a foreign Power, its methods, its beliefs and its aims. And there never would have been such a film of course but for the fact that the Nazis created their spy system and were betrayed by a postman's curiosity in faraway Scotland. The effect of the movie on America is reported to be profound. A lew more such films and there would be no doubt of the position of the United States in a new