Above Suspicion

An Oxford academic and his wife, travelling in Europe on their honeymoon, take on a small job for British intelligence: pick up the trail of an agent who has gone missing in Germany and get out whatever he gathered. At first it looks like a game squeezed into a holiday. The further they go into a Europe on the edge of war, the more serious it becomes, until the couple are in the middle of a chase with no way back. It comes from Helen MacInnes's 1941 novel. What the film is most remembered for now is Conrad Veidt: when the Nazis took power he left Germany with his Jewish wife, became a British citizen and went on to play Nazi officers repeatedly in Hollywood. This was his last film; he died of a heart attack in April 1943, a few weeks after shooting finished. Because his name was blacklisted in Germany, no official announcement of his death was made there. Joan Crawford and Basil Rathbone are opposite him.