Highly Dangerous (1950)

It’s not really a trailer, it’s the first 10 minutes but that ought to give you a good idea of whether you want to watch the rest.

It’s a lot of fun.  If the tone was serious then it would be a classic espionage/counterespionage story but as it is, it’s more of a fun spy caper kind of movie.  It’s nice to see Margaret Lockwood come into her own 10 years later.  I understand what they were doing with a fan immersion into the medium but it sort of condescendingly looks down on her native abilities to undertake the same endeavors without fully embracing the cheesy plot concepts that are later seen in the 80’s and early 90’s.  I suppose if you don’t want to commit the story to either extreme then they did the best they could to achieve a middle ground.

Dane Clark played a great straight man to her character’s eccentricities, very likable and very funny.  Sort of a better looking cross between Paul Reiser and Steve Guttenberg.

In all reality though, the concept of infiltrating a police state country in order to investigate rumors of biological weapons development by a civilian scientist is quite a bit ahead of its time.  It’s the 1950’s, atomic power was still fairly strongly in the mind of most audiences as a very important military threat.  Biological warfare would have seemed a little juvenile in comparison whereas now with second-strike armistice and detente, it is actually quite a bit relevant (re: chemical attacks in Syria in 2013).

It’s a great movie to watch and you should really see Marius Goring.  He was like a bushy, foreign Columbo who didn’t mind killing people.

–Kryptosfan