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
