Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Suspense, a little intrigue, adventure and espionage make for an enjoyable World War II movie. "Above Suspicion" has all of that and a little more. It has romance in a newly wed couple. And its stellar cast give good performances all around. This movie is based on a novel of the same name by Scottish writer Helen MacInnes. The story takes place in 1939, before the start of World War II. Although filmed entirely in California, the outdoor scenes around Mt. Wilson and Bishop could resemble scenes in Austria and southern Germany. The MGM studio set was so authentically recreated that I saw a couple scenes with small religious wayside shrines in them. These are common in many places in Europe. I wonder what audiences thought when they heard reference in this movie to Dachau. The concentration camp had been opened there in 1933 for political prisoners. While the Allies knew about the POW camps and concentration camps by the middle of the war, the public had heard very little about them yet in the press. So, this film has two references to Dachau – but they don't use the word "concentration" in the same breath. At one point toward the end, Fred MacMurray's character, Richard Myles, says, "At least it's not a concentration camp," referring to the detention place where the Nazis have taken his wife.Joan Crawford plays Frances Myles, the new bride of Oxford professor Myles. Conrad Veidt, Basil Rathbone, Reginald Owen and Bruce Lester round out the list of the major supporting cast. All do very well. The film has a couple of humorous lines as well. When Richard and Frances are in Salzburg, Austria, they are almost trampled by German troops marching in the street. A Gestapo officer goes into a bookstore where they are browsing and trying to make a contact. He has words with Richard who then answers him with a closing term, "dope." The Gestapo officer turns to a woman in the shop and asks her in German what "dope" means.This was the last film that Conrad Veidt made. He died of a heart attack on April 3, 1943, the month before the film was released. Veidt is most famous for having played the Gestapo Major Strasser in the 1942 film, Casablanca. But he had been an accomplished actor and film star in Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Veidt and his Jewish wife, Lily, fled the country. He became a British citizen in 1939, moved to the U.S. and made many films here. In war films, he was most often cast as a German officer or Nazi chief. He was equally adept at comedy, mystery, romance and drama. Veidt was only 50 years old when he died. It's too bad he didn't live to see the end of the Nazi regime which he so despised. This film is a light espionage thriller that most should enjoy. It's a nice showcase of several stars of the time, with a last, kind look at Conrad Veidt.

I'll always have a special place in my heart for this film because it casts the usual Nazi villain Conrad Veidt as the good guy for a change. With that severe face and totally serious Arian voice, he was typecast for years as villains, and once World War II came around, he was relegated to playing cultured Germans who underneath were anything but on the side of the Allies. But here, sadly in his last film, he is cast against type, that face and voice still imperious, but with a much lighter heart, and on the side of an American couple (Fred MacMurray and Joan Crawford) who are on the European mainland on their honeymoon. MacMurray is an Oxford professor who was asked on his way out of England to perform a service for the Allies and new wife Crawford is game for helping him. On the way, they encounter MacMurray's old college chum Basil Rathbone who hides his suspicions in order to find out what MacMurray and Crawford are up to. Veidt keeps popping up for a few amusing bits, and you aren't quite sure why he's there. There's murder at the symphony, a chase down a mountain road, and ultimately a confrontation between Allies and the Axis that goes the way of the Reichstag.A fine cast of supporting players include Cecil Cunningham as Rathbone's imperious mama, Eily Malyon as a hotel attendant ("Make sure you pull down the shade", she tells MacMurray and Crawford suspiciously, adding "There's a practice blackout tonight" for comic innuendo) and MGM perennial Reginald Owen. While this was Crawford's last MGM film under her long contract and she had been considered box-office poison, it was a nice way to leave the studio she had considered home for 18 years. It has all the fun of some of the lightly comic anti-Nazi films that Warner Brothers had done (particularly "All Through the Night") with MacMurray wryly delivering some lines insulting the Nazis. "Vat is dope?" one of the S.S. workers asks rather confused. Relatively short at only 90 minutes, the film flies by, its mix of romance, comedy and action always entertaining and entirely suspenseful.

The cast is attractive, the premise is intriguing....but the film is blah. It looked like a poor man's "The Thin Man," or tried to be, but all it wound up was "poor." The humor was average at best, and it took way, way too long to get to any action and suspense. By halfway through, I can imagine most of the audience in the theater half asleep.Being a fan of classic films, especially during the 1990s when I couldn't watch enough of these old movies, I was pumped up to see a film starring Joan Crawford, Fred MacMurray, Conrad Veidt, Basil Rathbone and Reginald Owen. That's some cast. But this story is just plain ludicrous. Do they honestly believe the British Foreign Office and newlywed and her husband - with no experience - to go inside Nazi Germany and be an effective spy?Well, maybe that's where the humor came in, but it's "Thin Man" quality and Crawford and MacMurray, although fine actors, are no Myrna Loy and William Powell in playing these kind of roles. The "Thin Man" movies had far more sophistication than this film. No, this just doesn't cut it in any aspect: humor, suspense or credibility.

Those wonderful movies of the past. The film's setting is in the days prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Although it would have been highly unlikely that British Intelligence would have asked two non-Britishers and non-professionals to do a bit of spying for them which could turn very dangerous for them and give the whole thing away plus creating an international scandal (the World War had not yet started), yet it is always interesting to see how it would have developed. Good slick direction by Mr. Thorpe, excellent acting by Mr. McMurray and specially by Miss Crawford, excellent set design which does not forget the overcoats needed on the Brenner Pass between Austria (in the Film the country is called Southern Germany) and Itally (which did not get into the War until 1940). Good to see two decent people doing the right thing for the right cause endangering their own lives to get away from the Nazi and back to safety. Good work and fun to watch and don't forget the inimitable Mr. Veidt. He should have been in Hollywood a decade earlier.Barzin SamimiTehran, Iran