Margaret Lockwood returned to movies after an 18 month absence to make the sort of film where she first got an international reputation - the comedy thriller, so well essayed in The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich. She surrounded herself with good talent - American leading man Dane Clark, writer Eric Ambler, director Roy Ward Baker and Naunton Wayne who was in the first two movies.
And it's a solid story with a strong female role - she's an insect scientist asked by British intelligence to do a mission for them in an unnamed Eastern European country (this was very popular around this time - State Secret, Crisis), where she crosses swords with the local copper (Marius Goring) and is helped by an American journo (Dane Clare).
But the film never quite works because the tone is all over the shop. Baker/Ambler/Lockwood play the whole thing straight, which starts off okay with various assassinations and machinations. But then part way through the film Goring gives Lockwood some truth serum and she gets confused with a radio spy drama and thinks she's an actual spy (which is a comic conceit similar to the one used later in Jo Beth Williams' American Dreamer) - only they still seem to play it straight even though it's outlandish.
The biggest problem with this film is it's just not fun. Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich were fun - characters were in peril but you had Charters and Caldicott, interesting subplots and entertaining banter involving the two leads. There are no light comic relief characters here, it badly lacks a subplot and the two leads lack chemistry. Lockwood, so fun in those two movies I listed, feels all wrong here - too old, her hair's too short, she doesn't have a fixed character, something. She lacks spirit and pizzazz. Dane Clark tries his best but he's a bit weird.
The film is solidly constructed - it has a beginning middle an end, conflict, all that stuff - but you're likely to simply not care, and it's not that mysterious why it failed to revive Lockwood's career.
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