Yellow Canary

I was pleasantly surprised by this film, filled with twists and turns it feels wrong to give too much away so I'll keep my review brief.

The acting is all decent, everyone gives quite a funny and memorable performance with maybe a couple exceptions. The cinematography is surprisingly good with it mostly feeling pretty standard but sometimes delivering some very dynamic shots with oners and odd angles.

The negative aspects of this film are few but the first half of the film is slightly boring and the editing is incredibly plain, just fades and cuts, nothing very interesting. I also think that the film could do with subtitles when Nazis are speaking, I have a basic knowledge of German but with the sound quality and speed they were speaking I struggled to understand anything they said and while this didn't really matter much to the plot it still would have been nice, even if it may have ruined a couple reveals towards the end. Still this film was surprisingly good, if they remade it today I would be well up for watching it again 7/10.

Readily admitting that I know nothing about Director Herbert Wilcox, I am grateful to IMDB for affording the important - and extremely interesting - piece of information that he was married to the film's female lead, the elegant Anna Neagle, who is also filmed to her advantage as befits a director in love with his star.

Other curiosities are that the excellent support cast includes the great Margaret Rutherford as the nonstop chatterbox, Richard Greene who would become British TV's Robin Hood a decade or more later, the ever slithering Albert Lieven flashing a swastika-bearing cigarette case, and actor Miles Malleson (better known as as the dithering, poetic executioner in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS) this time out of camera as script writer.

The script certainly is not short on innuendo and clever turns as Neagle receives a stuffed yellow canary in the mail that is her intro to a highly restrictive Nazi cell in Halifax, Canada, to where she travels by ship under the guard of Greene.

Wonderful to see Canadian-British cooperation to down the Nazi cell, pity that Canadian landscapes do not feature more.

Needless to say, you need to suspend your disbelief here and there but YELLOW CANARY is great fun to watch if you are not one of those viewers who expect directors, screenwriters and cameramen in 1943 to be aware of CGI, cinema industry changes and all the rest of it that causes some current viewers to brand movies like this one as "dated."

I enjoyed it thoroughly and hope to have the opportunity to rewatch it in the not too distant future. 7/10.

The U. S. version of this film (and also a Spanish-subtitled version on Amazon, apparently) is missing around 11 minutes near the beginning. The minutes are rather important, because they include a scene at the protagonist's home that is helpful for later developments. Those minutes also include Nova Pilbeam, who plays the protagonist's sister. This is the version shown on TCM. However, there is a seemingly complete version currently (2021) available on youtube, and the viewer should watch the first quarter-hour there. I thought I was alerted to this fact here on IMDb, and I wanted to thank the user, but I can't find the note. It must have been two reviewers of the Spanish-subtitled version on Amazon. Enjoyable film, more enjoyable with the minutes included. Happy to see Richard Greene, because I always used to watch him in Robin Hood when I was a child. Margaret Rutherford is terrific in her small parts, and Anna Neagle is very good too.

During the war, the Ministry of Information subsided the film industry resulting in a lot of mindless flag-waving carbon copy movies. Not this though! Intelligent, intriguing, suspenseful and extremely well made describes this one.

Some have called this the thinking person's wartime spy film but that makes this sound much drier than this actually is. This is not a dry, cerebral espionage story - this has real, likeable people who make you care about them and drag you into the story. It's even got Margaret Rutherford and Claude Bailey providing exactly the right amount of comedy..... which is a difficult thing to achieve. Most comedic inserts in films of this era are either cringingly unfunny or so out of context that they just annoy you. Herbert Wilcox however gets this spot on.

Although Mr Wilcox had been making pictures for years (indeed, he almost single-handedly started up the British film industry), I've never considered him outstanding. This however is outstanding: superb writing, superb cinematography, superb acting and incredible atmosphere.

Although the soon to be Mrs Wilcox, Anna Neagle had also been making pictures for years, I've never understood what it was about her that made her so popular. Maybe, as is clearly demonstrated in this, it was because she was a brilliant actress. You'll be impressed. Richard Greene is also a surprisingly excellent personable leading man. Lastly, who remembers that old poet Cyril Fletcher reading his silly "odd odes" on That's Life in the seventies? Well here he is as a young man, doing the same, sans chaise!

If you like wartime espionage films - this is for you. (The Ian Fleming in this however isn't that Ian Fleming.)

British, made in 1943, which tells you the ideological basis of the film.

It's a well-worked story of deception and counter-deception, mostly set in Halifax, NS. Evil Nazi agents and heroic British agents, with Richard Greene looking handsomer than ever in the van, mount operations against each other. Anna Neagle plays a double agent, which means she has to act acting, a test of ability which she carries off very well.

Margaret Rutherford has a stormer of a cameo role, shamelessly stealing every scene she's in. Her line "Wouldn't it be nice to do something violent?" is a classic.

Well above average example of routine genre.