The Spy in Black (1939)

Michael Powell's occasionally spooky hybrid between a war thriller and film noir.


Directed by: Michael Powell
Cinematography by: Bernard Browne


After the success of The Edge of the World (1937), super-producer Alexander Korda hired Powell to direct movies for his company London Films. It was on this film that Powell would first meet Emeric Pressburger - hired to rewrite the movie’s script; adapted from the novel by J. Storer Clouston - and their legendary partnership was born. Powell claims to have been flabbergasted by Pressburger’s writing abilities, and, in reference to said abilities, would later label Pressburger a “small Hungarian wizard.”


The Spy in Black is a noir-ish war thriller about WWI spies in which really cool words like “espionage” and “subterfuge” can be used to describe the plot (merely writing the words makes me all tingly inside, although that could just be my arteries constricting from the McDonalds I had for lunch).


Powell and cinematographer Bernard Browne shot the film in stark black and white, where the shadows are so rich - seeming to suffocate the light, enshrouding the characters in darkness - that at times it takes on the aesthetic of a horror movie, and likely not unintentionally.


Conrad Veidt, playing the film’s main character, earned acclaim early in his career creeping through the shadows of silent horror classics, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), from German expressionist director Robert Wiene. Even the fifth photo in the set, of a disembodied hand tapping on a window, ostensibly pays tribute to Veidt and Wiene’s highly influential silent horror film, The Hands of Orlac (1924): a macabre affair in which a gifted pianist loses his hands in a railway accident, and has the hands of a recently executed murderer transplanted onto him: a story that’s been told and re-told and parodied endless time.


The Spy in Black would mark a transformative turning point in Powell’s career. With increasing recognition for his technical expertise behind the camera, a one-of-a-kind writing partner in Emeric Pressburger, and financing from one of the world’s most renowned producers in Alexander Korda, history was waiting to be made.


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