... 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.