Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (March 28, 2023)
For fairly obvious reasons, Hollywood wouldn’t crank out movies that judged the Axis Powers until after the US entered World War II in late 1941. However, that doesn’t mean studios avoided these topics altogether, and for an early entry in this genre, we go to 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy.
The German-American Bund consists of Germans who live in the US. Led by Doctor Karl Kassel (Paul Lukas), the organization receives orders from the homeland to rally support for Hitler’s regime.
Along the way, Dr. Kassel recruits unemployed malcontent Kurt Schneider (Francis Lederer) to operate as part of a spy ring that also includes Franz Schlager (George Sanders) and Hilda Kleinhauer (Dorothy Tree). As this group attempts to subvert American democracy, FBI Agent Edward Renard (Edward G. Robinson) works to stop them.
Spy comes influenced by real events, a factor that the filmmakers play up throughout the movie. Mainly this comes from the reference to specifics dates and use of narration.
The voiceover pops up fairly frequently and comes out in a way that lends a newsreel air to the proceedings. This feels like an attempt to give the tale a sense of “realism” atypical for fictional work.
Too bad it doesn’t work, mainly because Spy comes with an oddly meandering narrative. While the synopsis implies a form of detective thriller, instead we get a rambling mix of domains.
We spend a lot of time with Kassel, Schneider, Schlager and others before Spy even sniffs the investigation that feels like it should be at the movie’s core. Heck, Renard doesn’t even enter the picture until 42 minutes into the flick – and then he promptly goes AWOL for about 15 minutes.
When Renard re-emerges, one might expect the story to kick into gear. Instead, it remains stuck in neutral.
A lot of Spy comes off as anti-Nazi propaganda. Not that it gets anything wrong – obviously Hitler’s Germany deserved all the negativity – but this means the movie’s agenda trumps its attempts to tell much of a story.
We follow a melange of characters as they pursue their “German superiority” without much beyond that. The actors – even the usually solid Sanders – overact to the hilt and make this material borderline campy.
Renard dominates the final third of the movie, but as noted, he doesn’t help make the tale more compelling. His investigation continues to seem more concerned with the desire to educate the US public about the nature of Nazi Germany than to create a taut tale.
Indeed, the entire final few minutes of Spy offer some of the most obvious proselytizing one can imagine. The movie goes into overt propaganda mode to warn Americans of the Nazi threat.
Given the politics of the time, I can’t say this acts as a bad choice. Barely 20 years after the end of World War I and still suffering from the Great Depression, much of the US lacked any appetite for another European conflict.
Seen from the hindsight of many decades later, we realize the necessity of US involvement in this domain, but from the POV of the time, the disinterest makes sense. As such, I understand that those behind Spy felt the need to educate Americans about the truth.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t make Spy an entertaining movie 80-plus years later. With a thin plot and hammy performances, it offers nothing more than a historical curiosity.
