Foreign Correspondent (1940) on Netflix
Crime reporter John Jones is sent to Europe as foreign correspondent Huntley Haverstock to cover the coming war. His first assignment is an interview with the Dutch diplomat Van Meer.
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- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
In mid-August 1939, as war nears, the New York Morning Globe sends crime reporter John Jones to Europe under the pen name Huntley Haverstock. His first task is an interview with the Dutch diplomat Van Meer, who shares his cab and dodges his questions about the coming conflict. At the luncheon Jones invites Carol to sit at his table, joking that no reporter will listen to the speeches. Stephen Fisher, who leads the Universal Peace Party, then announces that Van Meer is ill, and Carol, his daughter, speaks in the diplomat's place. Sent on to Amsterdam for Van Meer's next appearance, Jones greets him outside the hall and finds that the diplomat does not recognize him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The mid-ocean crash of the flying boat was staged by rear-projecting footage of a stunt aircraft diving over the ocean onto rice paper in front of the cockpit set, with two chutes from large water tanks behind it aimed to burst water through the paper as the plane hit.
- Hitchcock originally wanted Gary Cooper and Joan Fontaine for the leads, but Cooper was not interested in doing a thriller at the time and David O. Selznick would not loan out Fontaine; Cooper later admitted to Hitchcock that he had made a mistake turning the film down.
- After Hitchcock returned from England on July 3, 1940, reporting that the Germans were expected to begin bombing London at any time, Ben Hecht was called in to write a radio-station epilogue; filmed on July 5, it replaced the original transatlantic seaplane ending and foreshadowed Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts.
- Albert Bassermann, who played the Dutch diplomat Van Meer, was German and did not speak English, so he had to learn all of his lines phonetically; a supposedly Dutch girl in the film likewise speaks Dutch phonetically, though less convincingly.
- Hitchcock's own eccentric marriage proposal to his wife Alma was written into the film, and used for the scene in which Joel McCrea's John Jones proposes to Laraine Day's Carol.
