Hitchcock’s Secret Agent was released in 1936.  The film starred Sir John Gielgud, Madeleine Carroll, Peter Lorre, and Robert Young.  As the title implies, the story of the film is about a foreign spy on a mission.  The spy, as played by Gielgud, is a novelist named Brodie who becomes an English operative working under the codename “Ashenden”.  At the outset of the film, we witness a funeral.  We quickly learn this is a strange funeral, however, when we see that the coffin is empty.  The death of the novelist named Brodie has been staged by a powerful British official who goes by the name “R”.  R is an early forerunner of the character “M” from the James Bond series (a series which plays as an extended homage to Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest).  R stages Brodie’s death, and in turn asks if he would be interested in serving his country on a covert mission.  Brodie agrees, and R gives him the assignment as well as the alias “Richard Ashenden”.

The mission is to root out a German spy in Switzerland and dispatch of him before he can make a train for Turkey, by way of Constantinople.  Ashenden is to have a partner on this mission who will carry out the killing.  That partner is The General, played by the brilliant character actor Peter Lorre.  The General is depicted as an off-kilter character from the start, as we see him chasing a lady up the stairs of R’s government building.  In reference to this initial sight, Ashenden asks R, “Ladykiller, eh?”  To which R cryptically replies, “Not only ladies.”  This is a delicious double entendré by Hitchcock, that one fully understands when one notices the golden earring the murderous General wears in his right ear.

Secret Agent is a film with a great deal of comic relief.  It’s one of Hitchcock’s lightest thrillers, and a majority of that levity comes from Lorre’s characterization of The General.  The General makes repeated passes at every woman he encounters, is prone to wild fits of hysteria, and takes perverse satisfaction and glee in his trade, which is murder.  He also has the hilariously annoying habit of introducing himself with a name so long, complex, and quickly spoken that the misnomer “General” comes as much out of convenience as it does a sense of false respect from the characters.

In this film we are treated to a novel stylistic element that Hitchcock employs time and time again later in his career: the use of a charming and handsome villain.  This first in a long line of memorable antagonists is Robert Young, who until this point was best known for his work in light comedies.  He plays Robert Marvin in the film, a master German spy.  We first see Marvin leisurely eating grapes, flirting with the woman assigned as Ashenden’s assistant under the cover of being his wife, Elsa Carrington (played by Madeleine Carroll of The 39 Steps fame).  Marvin is attractive, charismatic, well dressed, and polite.  Ultimately revealing a character of seemingly admirable qualities to be a villain is a ploy Hitchcock loved to utilize, because he loved to subvert the expectations of his audiences.  The result was that his audiences were left guessing right up to the end, which always heightened the suspense and emotional identification of his films.

Another Hitchcock stylistic element used here and recurring in almost all his films is a romantic subplot.  To say subplot is almost unfair, because at the end of the day some of Hitchcock’s best films are about love just as much as they are about fear and sin and other unsavory conditions.  Elsa falls for Ashenden the moment she first lays eyes on him, as she tells him later in the film.  Ashenden admits he feels the same.  Therefore, their husband and wife play act soon flowers into a true full-blown affair.  Hitchcock was a romantic by nature, as much as he was a cynic (though he was never cynical about romance).  His best films feature love affairs so intense that they almost burn a hole through the screen; alive with a degree of chivalry and affection that is all but extinct in this detached postmodern age.  His films also often feature love triangles, and Secret Agent is no exception.  Marvin remains in the running for Elsa’s affections all the way until the end, when he is unmasked.  But it’s Ashenden her heart belongs to, and the final image of the film features their smiling faces side by side, united as a couple after a rollicking and dangerous adventure.

Take note of Hitchcock’s use of a church as a location of danger.  Hitchcock was a very religious man, but religion often functioned dubiously in his work, as a source of peril.  Take note of the high angle shots looking directly down on characters.  Hitchcock obsessively returned to this rigid, high angle view of action time and time again in his work.  It almost approximates the point-of-view of God, looking down on his subjects with neither pity nor anger.  But that point-of-view also refers to the director, who as Hitchcock himself states often functions as God in fiction filmmaking, breathing life into characters and situations.

Take special note of the scene in which the wrong man is marked for murder.  After finding a coat button in the grasp of a corpse, Ashenden and The General assume the button must belong to the murderer, and thus the secret agent they are after.  Later that night at a casino, Ashenden shows Elsa the button.  Just then, a man bumps into him and causes Ashenden to accidentally drop the button in the middle of a roulette table, on lucky number 7 no doubt.  Sure enough, 7 just happens to hit at that moment, and everyone at the table laughs at the sight of a winning, yet worthless button.  Marvin picks up the button and immediately thinks it belongs to an innocent man standing by the table named Caypor (although whether he does this purposefully is subject to debate).  Ashenden and The General see Caypor take the button, and in turn assume they have finally found their man.  They kill him in the next scene, though Ashenden only watches The General carry out the dirty deed from a great distance, and this incorrect murder becomes the turning point of the film (while the button becomes yet another innocuous object charged with meaning in traditional Hitchcock fashion).  This erroneous murder is spawned by the cruel hand of fate, which plays a central role in a majority of Hitchcock’s work.  This brilliant sequence which details that “hand of fate” also betrays the masterful artistic hand at work on this film, always in full control of a rich and intricate tapestry.

Notice also the time-honored cinematic technique of an iris in on Caypor’s smiling face at the end of the casino sequence.  This iris (masking) technique is used by Hitchcock a lot.  Sometimes it evokes the silent era of filmmaking he trained in.  Here, it also foreshadows Caypor’s death, which we see through a matching telescope lens view as a horrified Ashenden watches.

Most Hitchcock films feature a structuring motif that orders the text.  In Secret Agent, that structuring motif is writing.  Repeatedly in the film we see secret messages, sometimes written in code.  These codes detail the exposition of the film at key points, and also become the primary form of communication between the characters.  And of course, Ashenden is really Brodie, who is a novelist by trade, a man of letters.

The final stylistic element of Hitchcock’s that we see in this film is the use of an apocalyptic conclusion.  Hitchcock’s films often featured a larger-then-life, explosive ending that almost seems to indicate the end of the world is near.  One recalls Rebecca, Strangers on a Train (1951), and The Birds as examples.  In Secret Agent, the rousing finale involves an aerial assault by warplane and a fantastic train wreck which ignites a fiery inferno.  Hitchcock was a master showman.  His use of astonishing conclusions of this type was yet another strategy of his to give the audience more bang for their buck in his obsessive, all-out and never-ending quest to satisfy.

Other Alfred Hitchcock films discussed that you may also enjoy:
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Secret Agent” (1936)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Jamaica Inn” (1939)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Lifeboat” (1944)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “The Trouble with Harry” (1955)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Topaz” (1969)
HITCHCOCK: The Lost Masterworks – “Frenzy” (1972)
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: “Frenzy” (1972) – Part 1
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: “Frenzy” (1972) – Part 2