The House of Intrigue (1956) User Reviews

London Calling North Pole

[richardchatten · 6/10 · 5 September 2019]

An elaborate production in colour & Cinemascope largely set in occupied Holland (yes, there are windmills!) which rather anticipates 'Operation Crossbow' but without the slam-bang 'Guns of Navarone'-style climax. It moves back and forth through an international cast presided over by a paternal Curd Jurgens during his brief fifties tenure in war films playing 'good' Germans. (He plays an intelligence officer who would treat captured spies humanely if only he didn't have to answer to diehard Nazis given to pronouncements like "Well? What do I tell Mr. Himmler?" or "I warned you many times, humanity has no place in war").

Apart from Jurgens most of the rest of the cast tend to come and go (while Albert Lieven is ever-present flanking Jurgens but given remarkably little to say or do). No attempt as usual has been made to make female lead Dawn Addams look remotely in period (who makes a Bond Girl arrival in Holland by rubber dingy, worming her way at night across a beach and cutting through barbed wire in a diving suit while carrying a chic new wardrobe to change into once on dry land).

Murky potboiler

[Leofwine_draca · 4/10 · 11 August 2015]

THE HOUSE OF INTRIGUE is a WW2 spy thriller based on the true story of a British agent who ends up being captured by the Nazis and forced to broadcast messages back to his allies back home, thus leading many men into a trap. The film is centred around a gruff but kindly performance from Curd Jurgens as the fatherly Nazi officer who may be the one good German in the whole of their army.

The film itself is an Italian production directed by Duilio Coletti, a rather old fashioned guy who had been working since the 1930s. Well-paced it isn't; the plot is jumbled and needlessly complex, with far too many extraneous figures taking centre stage, and there's a definite lack of real protagonists. The best thing about it is probably the downbeat, deeply pessimistic climax.

Dawn Addams (later of Hammer's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS) is the female of the piece, about the only distinguished role in the whole thing (apart from Jurgens). The TV print I watched of this movie was pretty horrendous, which may have affected my enjoyment of the film somewhere. I suspect a book retelling the same story would have been more interesting.

Courteous Curt's Englandspiel

[VanheesBenoit · 8/10 · 6 March 2012]

Fairly close based on the Englandspiel-episode during the Second World War. An Abwehr or Counterspy unit of the German Army (unit III-F) manages to capture an English radio-operator dropped in the occupied Netherlands. In stead of torturing or executing him, like the Gestapo surely would have done, Colonel Bernes (Curd Jürgens) treats the prisoner with respect and according to international laws.

After a while he persuades the prisoner to send a new radio message to London. As taught during his training, the British agent deliberately makes no mistakes in his message. This should have set off alarm bells across the Chanel, as he normally was supposed to make well defined mistakes at specific places in his message. Such an extra security measure is called a "security check".

To his amazement though, London goes on sending agents , weapons, munitions and all kind of goods to the Netherlands. In the meantime, a German radio operator has closely studied the way the "signature" of the British radio-operator, and is soon able to imitate his way of communicating perfectly. When a captured British agent manages to escape and to get back to England, Bernes's operation is in danger. But the German fox has other tricks on his sleeve… In real life, this Operation Nordpol was led by Major Hermann Giskes (1896-1977). His team managed to arrest 59 agents between 1941 and 1943, from which 54 were executed in September 1944.

It is still inconclusive whether the British made terrible mistakes, leading to the death of more than 40 agents, or whether they knew what had happened, but deliberately went on sending agents to the Netherlands, supposedly to mislead the Germans. Some researchers claim the idea might have been to make Berlin believe that an invasion soon would take place in Western Europe. This way London was hoping to keep as much as possible German soldiers in the Netherlands, giving the Russians more time to organize their counter offensive on the Eastern Front. As long as the British refuse to give access to all the SOE archives, the truth will remain buried. And since opening up the archives would reveal either incompetence OR incredible cynicism, it is rather unlikely that this will soon take place.

Historically relatively accurate, and an interesting movie for "completists" of 'serious' spy movies. Jürgens plays an almost father-like figure, a courteous gentlemen, just doing his job, without hate or fanaticism. Based on the German version of the movie.