Berlin Correspondent

You will find this little bit of propoganda typical of the period mid Second World War just before the U. S. got drawn into the conflict by the Pearl Harbor attack quite enjoyable.

Very short running time but it has all the tropes of the propganda films. The villainous Nazi Gestapo being at the forefrunt here.

Dana Andrews delivers a gusto performance as the American Berlin 'Correspondent' who is revealing secrets from Germany over coded radio broadcasts.

He falls for a Gestapo agent who tries to investigate if he is the source of the leak in the process dragging her father into the Gestapo investigation with deadly consequences.

The film keeps you engrossed throughout and has some thrilling scenes more becoming of a higher budget film.

Very mucjh reminding of similar rants like "Comrade X" and Lubitsch's "To Be or Not to Be" and other similar comedies who all compete in turning all established officials into astronomic dunderheads and ridiculous idiots, and here is even Sig Ruman to complete the Nazi haberdashery getting out of his pants. All you miss here is a caricature of Hitler also. But Dana Andrews is good with a moustache, almost like Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and Virginia Gilmore is charming and sexy enough, even for a German spy. The plot is ridiculously absurd to start with, but when it comes to her father it gets more interesting, and there is even some inside views of a concentration camp with its atrocities - fairly iunknown to Amerticans in 1942. In brief, this is qualified entertainment, there are some pleasant surprises towards the end as the plots thicken up, and of course it all ends well for everyone except for Germany, - as everyone knows. It is better than "Comrade X" but can not compete with "To Be or Not to Bet" or with "Pimpernel Smith".

What Clark Gable was doing the Soviets in Comrade X Dana Andrews is doing to the Nazis in Berlin Correspondent. Of course Comrade X was a far better film.

This quickie from 20th Century Fox takes place starting in the summer of 1941 when the Nazis broke their pact with the Soviet Union and invaded. Dana Andrews is broadcasting to America with strict supervision, but still manages to get news in print to his home paper in New York that is too accurate for Nazi taste. This has the Gestapo most concerned and Martin Kosleck sends in his own girlfriend Virginia Gilmore to find out.

What she does find out hits home because her father Erwin Kalser is one of the helpers. She does a 180 degree spin and falls for Andrews and the rest is for you to watch.

This is one of those films from the WW2 years which makes the Nazis out to be ludicrously stupid. They weren't all Wilhelm Klink's or they would not have done what they did. You have to marvel at what our concept of a concentration camp was before they were liberated and how easily Andrews escapes.

Sig Ruman and Kurt Katch are also stupid Nazis in this film and Mona Maris is a jealous Nazi girl who has her own war with Gilmore to fight.

Berlin Correspondent is a mediocre remnant of World War II days and hardly likely to be in the Dana Andrews top 10.

We caught this movie on TCM. At first it struck us as having highly improbable scenes for Nazi Germany. But then, it struck us as being like the 1960s sitcom, "Hogan's Heroes". I can't help wondering if this movie inspired the makers of "Hogan's Heroes"?

... with Dana Andrews in an early role, a couple of years before Laura.

American correspondent Bill Roberts (Dana Andrews) broadcasts live from Berlin in late 1941 before Pearl Harbor. You'd wonder WHY he does this since he has about three or four Germans huddled around him every time he broadcasts to make sure he says only positive happy sappy things about Germany. And then you find out why he doesn't just quit and go home. He has been discovering German secrets and inserting those secrets in code inside of his broadcasts. In America these secrets are translated and sent on to our allies in Europe.

The Germans know he is doing this, and they don't just kick him out of the country because they want to know his source. They've tried numerous detectives and PI's but Bill has spotted them all. So a colonel in the SS gets his girlfriend in the Gestapo to act as a damsel in distress in a restaurant so that Bill can ride to her rescue, and then she can strike up a friendship with Bill and worm her way into his confidence. It works all too well - he is a bit smitten - and she gets the info. This leads the Gestapo back to - her own father! And she was the one telling him the secrets! Yikes!

This is all disclosed early on, so I'm not really spoiling it for you. This was not one of Fox's A list productions AND it has that typical WWII era production preachy shrillness to it, but it does have a few points to recommend it. For one, I don't think I've seen an impressionist/voice actor or a Gestapo love triangle inserted into such a film before as significant plot points.

Also, as much as American films played up the evil side of the Third Reich even early in the war, they were still quite uninformed at this point. They knew there were concentration camps where German political prisoners were kept, but they gave the Nazis too much credit for compassion. The camp shown here has the prisoners looking well fed and looks no worse than a deep south prison of the era that employed chain gangs - although I'm not saying that was not pretty bad.

The end is rather interesting in that it is reminiscent of Casablanca in several ways, down to the irony and a pseudo "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" kind of moment. The thing is, this film came first!

I'd recommend it. It is not long enough to get tiresome, is original in spots, and you get to see Dana Andrews in an early role.