Background to Danger (1943)

Admirable film.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

As the movie explains near the beginning, Turkey was neutral in World War II - after having been a German ally in World War I, which lead to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. This movie therefore served, among other things, as a message to those neutral Turks that the Germans were untrustworthy.But it also makes a lot of the Turks look bad, scheming and untrustworthy.And, once George Raft gets involved, a lot of innocent Turks get wasted in the gunplay between Raft and the various German henchmen.Despite the good cast and director, there really isn't much to like here. The Turks, if they can be drawn into war over a newspaper article, don't look very bright. The Russians, represented by Peter Lorre, look like alcoholics. (Brenda Marshall isn't any more convincing here than as a French resistance fighter in Paris After Dark, released that same year.) There isn't much excitement until the very end, and even then, I didn't find it very interesting.I can't imagine OWI approving this for distribution to Turkey or the rest of non-occupied Europe.

Completely Forgettable, if not for all the "Names" attached. The "A" list ranges from the Writers (credited or otherwise, the Director, and the Stars (top and under-billed). It culminates in one of the most stilted, interwoven, and flat looking Movies to come out of the "War Years" Propaganda assembly line.While all the parts are here to manufacture at least an Entertaining Flag Waiver, it is surprisingly a Lemon. There is hardly a Swastika in sight (maybe a Flag or two here and there) and the Nazis are mostly Semi-Shady Characters that are hardly threatening. Even the Cultured Fat Man is more amusing than intimidating.Not a Dud, but everyone on screen seems uninspired, considering the fate of the Free World is at hand, and it looks too Studio Bound (except for one accelerating car chase) to have an International feel. This one is for checklist completest only.

I liked this film although there were certainly many better for the time. It is the usual war time movie without being too much like the rest.How can you go wrong watching Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre together? Greenstreet is simply magnetic, and I was stunned to find out he debuted in films with Casablanca only a year before.I kept thinking during the movie how much better it would have been with someone else besides Raft in the title role, he is pretty wooden. I am not sure where his performance ranks with his other roles. I hope they were better but doubt that they were. I don't watch many of them normally.Brenda Marshall provides window dressing mostly and the ending smacks of a cheap knockoff attempt, but the rest wasn't too bad.

The central character in "Background to Danger" was an American agent operating outside neutral Turkey. Warner Brothers purchased the film rights to Eric Ambler's 1937 mystery thriller Background to Danger and assigned "Little Caesar" scenarist W.R. Burnett, along with two uncredited writers, William Faulkner and Daniel Fuchs, to change the location of the novel from Austria and Czechoslovakia to Turkey and the Syrian border. The hero in the novel, Kenyon, earns his money as a free-lance journalist, does not carry a gun, but suffers from a gambling addiction that keeps him short of money. For the film, Burnett and company turned Kenyon into Joe Barton, a gun-chewing American agent masquerading as an equipment salesman passing through Turkey. Burnett remembers rewriting the story to suit actor George Raft who played the lead character. Burnett said: "I was always afraid that I'd have to face Eric Ambler after what we did to that (his novel). The point of "Background to Danger" was that this man was a salesman, an outsider, and suddenly things begin to happen to him that he can't understand. And he gets involved in all this espionage. But Raft wouldn't do it unless he was an FBI man. The whole story went out the window."In the novel, the Soviets and the Nazis clash over Rumanian oil rather than the issue of Turkish neutrality. Essentially, Burnett updated the action and exploited Turkey's precarious neutrality. In the film, ruthless Colonel Robinson (Sidney Greenstreet of "Casablanca") tells one of his Nazi subordinates, "We must create an incident, any kind of incident, to convince Turkey, that Russia is about to attack her. How we accomplish this makes no matter." Robinson forges a number of maps and strategic documents that appear to be the Russian General Staff's master plan for the invasion of Turkey, and he intends to pay a newspaper to publish this ersatz material to cause a Turkish uprising. The scene shifts to a train depot in Aleppo, Syria, as Joe Barton spots a beautiful but mysterious woman, Ana Remzi (Osa Messen of "Tokyo Rose") , on the Bagdad-to-Istanbul express en route to Ankara. He has the porter seat him in the same compartment with Ana, and they strike up a conversation. While Barton departs momentarily to get Ana a pillow, she spots Ivor Rashenko, a tall, mustached man who has been following her. When Barton returns, she explains her predicament. She offers to pay him handsomely if he will hold $5000 worth of securities for her, because she fears that the authorities may search her and confiscate them. Since Barton is an American, she informs him, nobody has the authority to search him. Barton accepts the securities without question or money. In the book, a Jewish man confronted Kenyon on the train and gave the nearly broke journalist a tidy sum to conceal the documents should anything happen to him. After they detrain in Ankara, Barton goes to Ana's hotel in the seedy section of town, and she staggers out of her bedroom to meet him with a knife in her back. As Barton tries to leave, he crosses paths with two Russians agents, Nicolai Zaleshoff (Peter Lorre of "Casablanca") and his sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall of "The Constant Nymph") who want the sheaf of securities that Ana entrusted to Barton. Barton returns to his hotel, examines the envelope, and learns its contents' true value. The Nazis bang on his door, identify themselves as the police, and escort him away to their headquarters. Colonel Robinson introduces himself and tries to buy the documents from Barton. He knows that Barton has the documents because Ana Remzi was one of his agents. Barton refuses to sell them, so Robinson's henchmen take him down to the cellar to beat him with a blackjack. Before Robinson's sadistic henchman, Mailler (Kurt Katch of "The Pharaoh's Curse"), can get the information out of Barton, Nicolai intervenes. Nicolai and Tamara explain to Barton that they are Soviet agents, and they want the forged documents. Suspicious of Nicolai and Tamara, Barton agrees to turn the documents over to them at the Soviet Embassy. Unfortunately for Barton, when he returns to his hotel room, he finds the documents missing. Meanwhile, Robinson recovered the documents, went to Istanbul, and bribed a newspaper publisher to print them. Barton catches up with Robinson and agrees to switch sides and join the Nazis. As a test of his loyalty, Robinson asks Barton to shoot Nicolai, but the gun that Robinson gives Barton has no bullets in it. A fight ensues, Nicolai dies, but Barton escapes and prevents the newspaper publisher from printing the documents. He captures Robinson and turns him over to the Turkish authorities. He and Tamara drive off to Cairo "to cement Russian/American relations."Raoul Walsh keeps "Background to Danger" moving at a breezy clip. George Raft is perfectly cast with solid support, especially from Lorre and Marshall. Nevertheless, "Background to Danger" cannot compare with Walsh's earlier Errol Flynn epic "Desperate Journey," one of the best propaganda action comedies to come out of the war. "Background to Danger" is worth watching, but it isn't particularly memorable, just efficiently made and acted.