13 Rue Madeleine

CinemaSerf

James Cagney leads quite an efficient cast in this superior WWII espionage thriller. He heads a special outfit (077 not 007) charged with helping the resistance. The curious thing is that he, and the audience, know that he has a spy in the midst of his team - and we all now exactly whom that person is. What follows is a cleverly constructed cat and mouse game as they try to play him in order to find out how he communicates his treason and to whom. Cagney stands out, but Annabella ("Madame de Beaumont") and both Richard Conte ("O'Connell") and Frank Latimore ("Lassister") work well too, to keep the suspense running well for much of this 90 minute adventure. The story has plenty of action, only a modicum of romance to clutter up the drama and it delivers a strong sense of just how perilous the lives of these fighters, and their counter-espionage colleagues, actually was in the occupied territories. It does take a while to build up steam, and I could have been doing without the rather oppressively dramatic narrative from rent-a-voice Reed Hadley but this is certainly well worth a watch.