Austin Trevor

Stockholm, 1918: a French spy running a high-fashion dress shop, played by Vivien Leigh, falls for the German counterintelligence chief assigned to catch her, played by Conrad Veidt. Both know what the other is; neither can quite stop. Victor Saville directs the London Films production as an elegant cat-and-mouse romance where every ballroom scene doubles as tradecraft. Leigh, on the verge of Gone with the Wind, and Veidt, the great German exile who had played Cesare in Caligari, make an improbably magnetic pair, and the neutral Swedish setting lets the film keep its sympathies ambiguous. It is in the public domain in the United States.

War · Romance · Thriller

Alfred Hitchcock's loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Sylvia Sidney plays Winnie Verloc, wife of a London cinema owner (Oskar Homolka) who is secretly part of a gang of saboteurs, while Scotland Yard detective Ted Spencer (John Loder) watches the family from the shop next door. The film is infamous for its bus sequence, in which a bomb is carried through London by someone who doesn't know what they're carrying — a set piece Hitchcock later said he regretted for violating his own rule of suspense over shock. Released in the US in 1937 as The Woman Alone. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Thriller · Drama