Secret Lives [I Married a Spy] ** (1937, Neil Hamilton, Brigitte Horney, Gyles Isham, Ivor Barnard, Charles Carson, Raymond Lovell, Frederick Lloyd, Ben Field, Hay Petrie, Leslie Perrins) – Classic Movie Review 13,313

Brigitte Horney in Secret Lives.

Brigitte Horney, Neil Hamilton and Raymond Lovell star in director Edmond T Gréville’s long believed lost, now found 1937 British war drama film Secret Lives [I Married a Spy].

German actress Brigitte Horney stars as Lena Schmidt, Neil Hamilton as Lieutenant Pierre de Montmalion and Raymond Lovell as the German Secret Services Chief in director Edmond T Gréville’s 1937 British war drama film Secret Lives [I Married a Spy].

This romantic thriller was one of Britain’s hundred missing movies most wanted by the British Film Institute in their 1992 Missing Believed Lost list, but was discovered in the 90s in America in a truncated print under the US title I Married a Spy, running only 59 minutes instead of the original 79 minutes. However the original full film entitled Secret Lives now survives too, and is released by Studio Canal.

Secret Lives is merely an antique curio, a museum piece. It is very creaky and Horney’s performance is very hesitant, but it maintains a level of historical, if not so much dramatic, interest.

It is made at Ealing Studios by the independent Phoenix Films, and was released on 27 September 1937 by Associated British Film Distributors

The screenplay by Jeffrey Dell Edmond T. Gréville Basil Mason Hugh Perceval is based on a novel by Paul de Sainte Colombe, and tells how at the outbreak of the First World War Lena Schmidt, a young German-born woman just 20 when WW1 broke out and living in Paris, is interned and then recruited into the French secret service to work in Switzerland against the Nazis. She has to marry an interned French lieutenant to stay in the country.

Brigitte Horney (29 March 1911 – 27 July 1988)

The cast

The cast are Brigitte Horney as Lena Schmidt, Neil Hamilton as Lieutenant Pierre de Montmalion, Raymond Lovell as German Secret Service Chief, Charles Carson as Henri, Ivor Barnard as Baldhead, Frederick Lloyd as French Secret Service Chief. Leslie Perrins as J 14, Gyles Isham as Franz Abel, Hay Petrie as Robert Pigeon, Ben Field as Karl Schmidt, and Ralph Truman as Prison Guard.

© Derek Winnert 2024 – Classic Movie Review 13,313

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