I'll give Veronica Lake credit for wanting to try something different two years into her starting, having started off as a femme fatale in several classic film noir and then moving on to more serious parts. She had been very effective as a cold nurse in "So Proudly We Hail" who took a drastic measure to deal with her captors, and in this film, she plays a very unsympathetic character, the Austrian born nanny to a young boy in a prominent British household who is secretly a Nazi spy. His uncle, Franchot Tone, falls in love with her, not realizing that her sweet refugee act is just that. Even with knowing the details of her secret life, I found her performance to be cold and can't believe that the family didn't see through her. Lake simply walks and sits with a very severe posture which is supposed to indicate her attitude towards the allies, and her performance ends up being completely passionless. When the family is forced into a bomb shelter during a night raid, she sits there with no expression as her young charge performs a skit making fun of Hitler. That scene is just silly and eye-rolling.
Tone on the other hand plays a character who is a complete numbskull, oblivious to any indication that the woman his family has trusted with so much responsibility is an enemy of freedom. There are better performances by Henry Stephenson as the family patriarch, Binnie Barnes as an eccentric actress who has married into the family and the always wonderful Mary Gordon as the lovable Scottish housekeeper. It's easy to see through the more than hundred propaganda films made during World War II which ones stand the test of time and others which were rushed together to fill a quota for such films. I never felt any real emotion for the story, simply because it just laid there and it was obvious that she would be exposed. Even then, the film ends more with a whimper even as the bombs fall around the house.
Tone on the other hand plays a character who is a complete numbskull, oblivious to any indication that the woman his family has trusted with so much responsibility is an enemy of freedom. There are better performances by Henry Stephenson as the family patriarch, Binnie Barnes as an eccentric actress who has married into the family and the always wonderful Mary Gordon as the lovable Scottish housekeeper. It's easy to see through the more than hundred propaganda films made during World War II which ones stand the test of time and others which were rushed together to fill a quota for such films. I never felt any real emotion for the story, simply because it just laid there and it was obvious that she would be exposed. Even then, the film ends more with a whimper even as the bombs fall around the house.