"CLOUDS OVER EUROPE."

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 29, 3 August 1939, Page 15

"CLOUDS OVER EUROPE."

Unusual Espionage Film.

Although the recent unrest in Europe is distinguished for its lack of commendable features, picturegoers in New Zealand will shortly have reason to remember with pleasure that the Columbia studios have appealed to an awakened interest in international intrigue by producing "Clouds Over Europe," one of the cleverest and most entertaining, stories of espionage' yet presented in dramatic form. Press representatives and members of the trade in Wellington attended a private screening of this new release recently. The story deals with the efforts of a group of foreign agents of unspecified nationality to wrest from a British aeroplane manufacturing company the secrets of its new war planes. The elements of the tale are thus simple enough, but- the novel methods employed by the foreign agents, and, above all, the clever humour injected into the action by Ralph Richardson, who plays the part of Major Hammond, a particularly astute member of the British Intelligence Service, make the picture something quite out of the ordinary. Complications and humorous interludes are also provided by Valeric Hobson, as an enterprising girl newspaper reporter and brother of the major. The note of light-humoured adventure maintained throughout is struck in the opening scenes when the police raid the offices of a suspected foreign firm in London and carry off in the Black Maria a man in a bowler hat found asleep in one of the rooms. He is sent to the headquarters of the Intelligence Department to be interviewed by Major Hammond, but turns out to be Major Hammond himself, who has been knocked on the head by the vanished occupants of the raided offices. The disappearance of a number bf %arplanes on test flights is worrying Major Hammond, and, in face of circumstantial evidence and the ridicule of the aeroplane factory owner, and even of his official chief, he persists in his belief that foreign agents are responsible. It would take something of the enjoyment from a first-rate entertainment to tell of the part played in the disappearance of the planes by an innocent-looking salvage ship, of the murder of an employee of the aeroplane firm, and other details of the plot. Laurence Olivier is well cast as a crack air pilot who flies one of the ill-fated craft, and his romance with the girl reporter provides a necessary ingredient for the story.