People are voting emotionally.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

One of the great ironies of World War I was that Kaiser Wilhelm who built this great battle fleet to rival the British Navy never got to put it to real good use. Other than the inconclusive Battle Of Jutland the surface fleet sat out the war primarily. It was those U-Boats that in this war and the next were the primary weapon of the German Navy.Which brings us to this film. A plan calling for a U-Boat or two is drafted by the German Naval Command in which U-Boat Captain Conrad Veidt is to make his way to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands where the British fleet is anchored. Veidt puts ashore where he makes contact with a pair of British traitors, a cashiered captain Sebastian Shaw and a newly assigned schoolteacher in the region Valerie Hobson. When the fleet sails she will give Veidt instructions how to avoid the mine fields come in and do a Pearl Harbor on the fleet.Veidt is a most honorable sort, he wears a coat over his naval uniform as he does not wish to be shot as a spy. Of course when cornered he does ditch the uniform for another garb, the better to continue his activities as The Spy In Black. All however is not as it seems and history tells us such an event did not happen in World War I.Veidt, Hobson, and Shaw really care this film with their performances. Down in the cast one that stands out is Cyril Raymond as a nosy country parson who gets too curious for his own good.This film is a rarity in that Germans are not shown as intrinsically evil. That would change on both sides of the pond shortly.

This British film is set during WWI...WWII wouldn't begin for another few months after the film's domestic debut in March, 1939. But I am sure it played well during WWII--both because it's darned entertaining and also because the Germans are the baddies in this one.The film begins with a school teacher being abducted by two German agents. Then, a German submarine commander (Conrad Veidt) is sent on a mission to Britain that has everything to do with that school teacher. The woman was being sent to work in Scotland...very near to the British Navy base. So the faux teacher's job is to assist the submarine commander in his mission when he sneaks ashore. How does it all work out? Well, suffice to say exceptionally well...but I won't say more about that.The movie has lots of good things about it. Conrad Veidt was an exceptionally good actor and here he really was at his best. The film also looked great--with an exceptional use of matte paintings, great looking sets and real ships! Additionally, while I hate the use of stock footage, here it's really not bad at all. Nothing to dislike about this tense film.

An unusual spy thriller in that the main characters are all German spies or collaborators. THE SPY IN BLACK is set in Orkney in 1917, where a German U-boat captain has been sent to infiltrate the locals in respect of a planned attack. He soon develops a relationship with a school teacher who's also working for the Germans, and the stage is set for the forthcoming assault on the British fleet nearby.THE SPY IN BLACK offers far more than your usual war-time thriller, and it has a very interesting plot to boot. Michael Powell handles the direction superbly, crafting a fine-looking and atmospheric little thriller on what is obviously a low budget, and the small scale somehow adds to the effect. There are plenty of twists and turns in the short running time, many of which you won't see coming, alongside a ton of drama and incident.Headlining the cast is German actor Conrad Veidt, still packing a strong presence some 20 years after his role in THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI. The supporting performers are equally effective, especially Sebastian Shaw as the turned British officer Ashington and Valerie Hobson as the spy-turned-schoolmistress. Altogether this is a highly effective thriller and one of the best of the decade.

"The Spy in Black" is often regarded as the first "Archers" film, although it was not actually described as such; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger did not start to describe themselves as "The Archers" until "One of Our Aircraft Is Missing" from 1942. It was, however, the first film on which they worked together, with Powell being credited as the director and Pressburger as one of the scriptwriters. (In most of their later films, Powell and Pressburger were to share a joint writer- producer-director credit). Most of The Archers' early collaborations were wartime propaganda films, and "The Spy in Black" can also be regarded as such, even though it was made before the outbreak of war. (It actually opened in August 1939, a few days before the German invasion of Poland). The previous year Alfred Hitchcock had been forced to set another spy thriller, "The Lady Vanishes", in a fictitious fascist dictatorship, although it was clearly aimed at Nazi Germany. By 1939, however, it was widely recognised that war was imminent, and that there was no longer any point in British filmmakers trying to pretend that Germany was not a hostile power. "The Spy in Black" is therefore a World War I spy thriller, doubtless made with the agenda of preparing the British people for the coming conflict and reminding them that they would soon need to be on guard against German spies. The action takes place in the Orkney Islands, a remote part of Britain but one which took on great significance in both world wars because Scapa Flow, the body of water lying between the main islands, is one of the great natural harbours of the world and served as a British naval base. (A later "Archers" film, "I Know Where I'm Going!", was also set in a remote part of Scotland, a country which Michael Powell loved). The story is set in 1917, a time when Germany was being brought close to starvation by a British naval blockade. There are numerous references in the script to the hardship which this was causing in Germany, another piece of disguised propaganda to reassure the British people that British sea power had won the First World War (partially true) and that it would win any Second World War (a prediction which was to be proved wrong by events). After the Battle of Jutland, the German surface fleet did not dare to leave port, so Captain Hardt a German submarine commander, is ordered to lead an attack on the British Fleet. He puts ashore on the islands to make contact with a German spy, Fraulein Tiel, who is posing as the local schoolmistress. Tiel introduces him to Lieutenant Ashington, a disgraced British naval officer, who is offering to betray his country for money and to reveal vital secrets about British ship movements. There are, however, to be further developments, which leave Hardt wondering whether Tiel and Ashington are really what they claim to be. The film is in many ways similar to an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, although the Hitchcock film with which it has most in common is not one of his British spy thrillers from the thirties, like "The 39 Steps" or "The Lady Vanishes", but rather with "Notorious", which was not to be made until 1946. Both Hardt and Ashington fall in love with the beautiful young Fraulein Tiel, leading to a love-triangle reminiscent of that between the characters played by Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Rains in the later film. There are two particularly fine performances from the lovely Valerie Hobson and Conrad Veidt, later to become famous for his role in "Casablanca". Although Hardt is German, he is really the central character in the film, playing a more prominent role than any of the British characters, and is many ways a sympathetic one, being played as an honourable officer and gentleman rather than a villainous thug, which is how German officers were generally portrayed in British propaganda. This sort of characterisation, however, was to become typical of Pressburger's writing; even in films written after war had broken out he never lost sight of the fact that the enemy were human, and most of his wartime films include at least one "good German" such as Theo in "Colonel Blimp". The film contains one glaring plot hole at the end when the U-Boat surfaces to try and sink the Orkney Islands ferry; would a submarine on a vital secret mission really have given itself away in order to sink so insignificant a target, especially in an area where British warships are known to be operating? This, however, would really be my only complaint. "The Spy in Black" may have been made as a "quota quickie", films made quickly and cheaply to fulfill a government requirement that British cinemas show a minimum number of British films, but it is an exciting, well-made thriller which asks some pertinent questions about patriotism, loyalty and the moral dilemmas of war. For a "quickie" there is also some very attractive photography of the Orkney coastal scenery, shot on location. I would not rate this film quite as highly as the Archers' great war films like "49th Parallel", "Colonel Blimp" and "A Matter of Life and Death", but it certainly points the way towards them. 7/10