Dark Journey (1937)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Fantastic!

best movie i've ever seen.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Passable romantic spy yarn. Vivien Leigh looks as lovely as ever. Conrad Veidt is good but the chemistry with Leigh is just not there, in my opinion. It's also hard to buy Veidt as a suave ladies man. He's much more believable as a villain. Joan Gardner was the film's biggest standout as the temperamental Lupita. Sexy and alluring, I'm surprised she wasn't a bigger star. She provides all of the movie's oomph and humor, though her role is sadly small.It's all very dry and serious, which is fine considering the subject matter. I mean, I don't expect a comedy from WWI spy story, especially on the eve of WWII breaking out. However, it suffers from a lack of excitement. The romance is unexciting and passionless. Even the war stuff is unexciting. It's not a great film. However, it is competently put together and the charisma of the leads and the aforementioned Joan Gardner make it worth seeing once. Fans of Vivien Leigh will probably enjoy it more than the average viewer. She does quite well in the part, my other reservations about the film aside.

Eventually in this confusing film it is revealed that Vivien Leigh's character Madeleine is French, not Swiss, and that she is a spy for France, not Germany, but it takes a long time to figure out what is going on. The assortment of largely indistinguishable hangers-on among the German, French, and British groups in Stockholm does not help. With the exception of the British character Bob Carter, the others are a blur.Conrad Veidt, playing German spy Baron von Marwitz, was nearly 20 years older than young and beautiful Vivien Leigh, and his bearing in the film--not to mention his monocle!--makes him seem even older. Not a credible romance.Even as this film was being made, the atrocities of Hitler's Germany were in full force. Within two years it would be hard to imagine anyone looking kindly on the character of a German spy. But of course the burden of hindsight should not be forced upon this movie, which should stand on its own.A little harder to accept, however, is the romantic treatment of spy activities that ultimately resulted in the slaughter of thousands of men in the trenches of WW I. The brief shot of trench warfare in this movie makes quite a contrast with the scenes immediately following back in Stockholm--the lavish beer hall, the concert, the fashionable dress shop. The creation of autocrats, military arms makers, and rabid superpatriots, WW I wiped out an entire generation of young Britons, Frenchmen, and Germans.It's a well-mounted film, and Vivien Leigh is truly lovely in it, but I did not find it very enjoyable.

Cinema uber villain Conrad Veidt and delicate Vivien Leigh make for an odd but absorbing couple as spies on opposite sides in this suspense romance. Veidt's nefarious allure and usual commitment to cruelty is tempered long enough to get the attention of Miss Leigh and it gives the somewhat convoluted (she's a double agent) story a suspense that sustains itself up until the final moments.Madeline Goddard (Leigh) poses as a Stockholm dress shop owner while spying for Germany in neutral Sweden. Baron Karl Von Marwitz (Veidt) arrives in Stockholm to put the war behind him and live an epicurean existence of wine women and song. He also is merely posing. Goddard and Marwitz eventually become entangled and the passion between the two distracts them momentarily from their assignments which is to expose each other.Veidt and Leigh have some excellent scenes together fraught with suspense and romance as they parry back and forth using charm and suspicion for weapons. In spite of their contrasting stature they display a nice change of pace chemistry with director Victor Seville maintaining a degree of ambiguity with both leads late into the film as they struggle with duty and desire. There's a rousing gun battle between a sub and disguised transport in the finale with a somewhat schmaltzy climax that hinders the film, but Veidt and Leigh create enough fireworks of their own to make Desperate Journey worth the watch.

One of the first reviews I ever did for IMDb was of The Firefly, the 1937 MGM musical that starred Allan Jones and Jeanette MacDonald. The original book of the Broadway operetta was scrapped for a plot involving espionage agents working for the exiled King of Spain and for Napoleon and they were played by MacDonald and Jones respectively. It seems as though I may have discovered where the story came from as Dark Journey is in fact based on a couple of real life French and German agents operating during World War I. Both are stationed in neutral Stockholm and serve as conduits for intelligence for their respective governments. Like in The Firefly both fall for each other and in the end the female uses all her feminine charms to trap the male as the British use a Trojan horse gambit as well as Vivien Leigh's considerable charms to nail Conrad Veidt. What do they do, you have to watch Dark Journey for that, but I have to say it is rather clever.Dark Journey and Fire Over England with her then husband Laurence Olivier are the films that got Vivien Leigh her first real critical notice. Ultimately in her career which in point of fact has very few films to her credit, it led to double Academy Awards for Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. Her beauty is stunning in Dark Journey and no hint of the physical and mental problems that plagued her tragically all her adult life.Conrad Veidt who escaped Nazi Germany was also making quite a mark in the British cinema. His career role there would be Jaffa in The Thief of Bagdad and later on of course as Major Stroesser in Casablanca in the USA. He made a good living playing a lot of Nazis during World War II although he was as rabidly anti-Nazi as they come. He left Germany because he had a Jewish wife. He died way too young and never saw the ultimate triumph against Hitler.If any of you have seen The Firefly you know exactly what happens to both Leigh and Veidt. You could do a lot worse than seeing both of them back to back.