I Was a Spy

Biopic about a young Belgian nurse who turns spy against the occupying German force in WWI . Madeleine Carroll stars and has some moving moments, particularly towards the end of the film. The Germans are represented by domineering commandant Conrad Veidt and compassionate doctor Gerald Du Maurier whilst the Belgians are represented by kindly Edmund Gwenn as the Burgomaster and Martita Hunt as the lead character's aunt. Nigel Bruce is 10th billed and has two fleeting appearances early on as a convalescing Scotsman 'imaginatively' named Scottie.

There is a problem with this movie: a Flemish nurse gives indications to the British warplanes to bombard German troops being in the open field and then there after she is nursing the soldiers that she was betraying. Martha Knockaert was not a Mata Hari but she was dangerous and by her behavior she killed a lot of people. Her trial by the Germans military is correct as it was by that time in the West Flanders in 1916. The movie shows us the German troops at the market place in full exercise which gives the movie a moment of real authenticity. Also the "café" scenes with the German officers are real. Roeselare was at that time a backward city with a rural population but now it is the nerve of a commercial region. It is the only movie ever made about this town.

I Was A Spy is one of the better pictures to emerge from the early days of British talkies. It certainly stands up well against its American competition, which sad to say, many other British pictures of this period don't. The cast is uniformly good, and Madeleine Carroll is lovely as always. Perhaps the only reservations I have in this area is the way in which Herbert Marshall can deliver his lines a bit mechanically at times. Victor Saville's direction is nicely understated, yet the film can be quite exciting at times. There are two memorable scenes - the church parade, and the quietly effective closing moments of the film. Well worth seeing.

This was a big budget effort from Gaumont British.Madeleine Carroll was the highest paid British star of the era,and gives a very effective performance.She,Marshall and Veidt would all be in Hollywood by the end of the decade.

This briskly paced, highly suspenseful cinematic rendering of the war-time exploits of Martha Cnockhaert, a Belgian girl who reluctantly engaged in espionage work for the Allies during the Great War, is a must see for all who appreciate war films sans the usual cheap, one-sided displays of gratuitous propaganda masquerading as history that the various film factories seem to have a penchant for putting out. A great deal of the credit must go to director Victor Saville, who managed to refrain from incorporating any of the typically lurid tales of German atrocities allegedly perpetrated on the prostrate Belgians that had become the mainstay of the British disinformation network throughout the greater part of the war itself. The actual situation, as this film so ably depicts, was bad enough. For example, largely on account of the British naval blockade, the occupying Germans had to impose severe privations on the Belgian people who, as a result, were forced to hoard what little food there was for their own survival. Indeed, it was the witnessing of the constant abuse inflicted on her café-owning parents that spurred Martha to overcome her initial fear and enlist her services for the Belgian underground.

The beautiful Madeleine Carroll gives a convincing, at times deeply moving, portrait of the reluctant Belgian spy whose work as a volunteer nurse in a hospital for wounded Germans complicates her efforts to aid in their ultimate destruction. Indeed, ironically it is her dedicated work in relieving the suffering of war-- not to mention her exquisite beauty and charm- that endears her to the German commandant-- played by the great Conrad Veidt-- enabling her her to carry out more effectively her clandestine activities.

Perhaps the supreme irony of this film, however, resides in the fact that within 10 years, the woman who would play a volunteer nurse/spy in a movie would in real life give up her film career to volunteer as a real life Red Cross nurse in Italy during the sequel to the Great War. For that, Madeleine Carroll will, indeed, always be fondly remembered.