THE SPY IN BLACK
This 1939 film is the first collaboration between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, so I was quite prepared for it to be a bit odd, but I didn't expect the first half of it to be quite as disorientating as it was. The year is 1917, and the two main characters are a German U-boat commander, Hardt (played by Conrad Veidt) and Fräulein Tiel (Valerie Hobson), his contact in an espionage plot to destroy a significant proportion of the British Fleet at Scapa Flow. She is pretending to be a schoolteacher, Miss Burnett, on the Orkney Islands, and her home forms a base for a few days for her and Hardt, plus a disillusioned Royal Navy officer, Ashington, who is prepared to betray his country. As I was watching this I was thinking, wow, am I really supposed to be rooting for them to succeed? Surely not, especially since there is a sinister bit of business early on where German agents drug the real Miss Burnett and then throw her off a cliff. Admittedly Hardt seems a de...