Dark Journey **** (1937, Conrad Veidt, Vivien Leigh, Joan Gardner, Anthony Bushell, Ursula Jeans, Eliot Makeham, Austin Trevor) – Classic Movie Review 7806

Sparkling performances from the sleek and sexy team of Vivien Leigh and Conrad Veidt light up producer-director Victor Saville’s 1937 thriller Dark Journey [The Anxious Years], an involvingly dark and complex British espionage movie set in World War One in Stockholm.

Leigh plays Madeleine Goddard, a French couturière working in her own fashionable dress shop in wartime neutral Sweden when she is approached by a British intelligence official and recruited as a spy. Soon she is asked to cultivate the friendship of the German baron Karl Von Marwitz (Veidt) and then falls for her tall, handsome contact.

Victor Saville’s slick, brisk and smooth-running film still entertains satisfyingly with its ideal mix of romance, adventure and espionage, though it is a surprisingly cheap-looking and unconvincing production from Alexander Korda, but no matter.

The screenplay is written by Lajos Biró, with the scenario and dialogue by Arthur Wimperis.

Also in the cast are Joan Gardner, Anthony Bushell, Ursula Jeans, Eliot Makeham, Austin Trevor, Edmund Willard, Margery Pickard, Sam Livesey, Charles Carson, Philip Ray, Henry Oscar, Laurence Hanray, Cecil Parker, Reginald Tate, Percy Walsh, Robert Newton, William Dewhurst, Laidman Browne, M Martin Harvey and Anthony Holles.

Dark Journey [The Anxious Years] is directed by Victor Saville, runs 77 minutes, is made by London Film Productions and released by United Artists, is written by Lajos Biró and Arthur Wimperis, shot by Georges Périnal and Harry Stradling Sr, is produced by Alexander Korda and Victor Saville, is scored by Richard Addinsell and is designed by Andrej Andreiev and Ferdinand Belland.

Victor Saville originally offered to the lead to Miriam Hopkins. Though the film is set in 1918, the women’s fashions and hairstyles are those of 1937.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7806

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