Guerra a muerte

Highly Dangerous is a rare original screenplay by novelist Eric Ambler. It draws heavily on elements of his early pre-1939 thrillers, but reposts them behind the Iron Curtain. This film leans particularly on Ambler's first novel The Dark Frontier, most notably with the super-agent coda, which is very fashionable today.

Ambler's problem with Highly Dangerous is that most of the plot devices he invented single-handedly in the 30's were used to the point of saturation by film-makers during the 40's. By the time he got around to an original screenplay it all seems very unoriginal. For that reason I like to think of this film as British cinema's homage to all Ambler's great work in the 30's. An adaptation of one of Ambler's post war novels, say, Judgement On Deltchev, would have been much more satisfactory at this point in his career - as it was, he had to wait ten years until Topkapi before the cinema recognised his post-war novels.

Margaret Lockwood makes for a very beautiful and personable innocent, drawn into a cold-war plot about a form of biological warfare, not entirely a new thing, but a change from the nuclear threats of the time. Lockwood's career was on the decline, and this film can't have offered her very much compensation. Additionally, she is badly served by her make-up artist, her hair being mocked up to middle-age very badly.

Don't treat this film as a serious attempt to translate Ambler's art to the screen - you can find that in just about any war-time thriller - from Journey Into Fear to The Mask of Dimitrios. Highly Dangerous is minor Ambler, and an opportunity for a fading Lockwood to make one more impression, and what an impression - innocent, scientist and secret agent.

Many of the other reviews refer to the thin and unbelievable plot and casting. I beg to differ. 90% of modern films are pure unbelievable west coast Amertican dross, just think of the fare from Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and all the high school, college, so called coming of age movies awash with those stupid Californian accents, etc, etc, etc.

This is a British B/W film of the early 50s and has the benefit of Margaret Lockwood playing against type in a plot line which holds up well, it is a movie after all, escapism, and perfectly encapsulates the early post war, cold war fears and demons of the time, played in a gentle tongue in cheek way by the cast and director.

I enjoyed it immensely, and so will you. Give it a go, far superior to most modern movies.

Margaret Lockwood is Frances Gray, a scientist who takes on a government assignment that is "Highly Dangerous" in this 1950 film also starring Dane Clark, Wilfred Hyde-White and Marius Goring.

Frances Gray works with bugs, so the government asks her to go to a country of opposing ideology and get a sample of bugs being used by them, possibly for germ warfare. At first, she says no, and then relents and travels to this unnamed country posing as a tour director checking out possible tour locations.

Her cover is blown immediately by the chief of police (a heavily disguised Goring) who is on the train with her, and shortly afterward, her contact is killed, and she is arrested, drugged and questioned. The head of the British consulate, tipped off by a newspaper reporter she met previously (Clark) secures her release.

The film starts out as a drama, but the mood lightens once she's out of prison. Under the influence of the drug she's been given, she plots a way to get into the lab based not on reality but on the antics of a radio spy on a program her nephew likes. The reporter knows it won't work, but when the first part of it actually does, he goes along.

Margaret Lockwood went through several phases during her career - this was her mid period, after the ingénue of "The Lady Vanishes" and before the older woman in "Cast a Dark Shadow." She does a good job and looks very attractive.

The stronger role was Clark's - he was being groomed as another John Garfield but never quite got there - he's very good, handling both the dramatic and the comic aspects well. Goring is a far cry from Victoria's husband in "The Red Shoes" -this seems an odd role for him, but he's excellent.

An odd film but, if taken for what it is, a good one.

.......sixteen years before Hitchcock's film was released .

And ,which was not derivative for the time , they reverse the genres : Margaret Lockwood is the scientist ,on a mission which is deemed "highly dangerous" ;the male lead being just an attentive escort ; it's typically "cold war" movie, depicting the Reds as villains ,but shrewd villains: "we know that torture won't make it ,for the prisoner can say anything to avoid sufferings ;so a simple injection will do". The truth drug is efficient ,in its own special way : Lockwood begins to be delirious and does some kind of self-criticism : without her nephew's radio serial -very popular in the fifties,few people had TV sets in Europa -, and the boy's hero ,agent Conway, she would perhaps have opted for her holiday in Torquay :hence the ironical passport!

No matter what the "Mcguffin " is: the most important thing is the feminist side of the movie,ahead of its time ;and Lockwood's portrait of a determined woman is convincing.

Nicole Kidman was following an honourable tradition when she played a gorgeous neuro-surgeon in Days of Thunder for Highly Dangerous casts beautiful Margaret Lockwood as an entomologist. On this evidence the main job qualification seems to be that you don't find insects repulsive. What next, JayLo as a nuclear physicist?

Despite being written by the estimable Eric Ambler, the screenplay for Highly Dangerous seems to me to be somewhat misjudged. The `humorous' elements, while never being remotely funny, serve to drain the excitement away from the dramatic sequences. I think the film would have worked much better as a straight thriller without all the nonsense of Margaret imagining she is a character in a radio serial after she's been given a `truth drug'

Highly Dangerous has many elements typical of a Cold War drama of its time, the implacable police chief (a typecast Marius Goring), the brutal armed forces, the dissident priest who shelters the fugitives etc. Interesting that the war in this case is biological.

Apart from the interest this film will have for the fans of Margaret Lockwood, a big British star of the years around World War II, Highly Dangerous is at best a fair time-passer.