They Met in the Dark

1945
6.2| 1h31m| NR| en
Details

A Royal navy Commander is tricked by a pretty girl who is working for the Nazis. She tricks him into revealing some military secrets and he is court martial. He vows to track her and her accomplices down.

Director

Producted By

Marcel Hellman Productions

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Reviews

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!
Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.
Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
JohnHowardReid For one horrible moment it looks as if Mason is going to play the whole film in an ill-becoming naval beard. Fortunately he gets the sack early on and is able to shave it off. As you know I operate on the principle that any film with Herbert Lomas is an entertaining one. Good old Lomas has a typically spooky informative role here, even if but a brief one. And as for finding my favorite comic detective/spy chaser Tom Walls on the wrong side of the law for once, it's a pleasure... If this comedy-thriller is a bit shy in the laughs department — despite (or maybe because of) its hard-working heroine — it certainly delivers the thrills. Three or four scenes (a rendezvous with a corpse in a spooky house; attempted murder on a speeding train; Chesney playing the secret code) are staged with all the flair and panache of the master himself. In fact, when you come right down to it, the script has quite a few echoes of The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Number 17, and Young and Innocent.The Director: A refugee from Hitler's Germany who served in the Royal Air Force during the war, Lamac has an extraordinarily large number of distinguished European films to his credit including The Bat, Little Dorrit, White Horse Inn, Hound of the Baskervilles and The Ghost Train.
bkoganbing Reading the synopsis of They Met In The Dark I was expecting quite a different film. The plot outline made it sound incredibly serious and this was wartime Great Britain.Instead I got a rather lighthearted treatment of the plight of courtmartialed Naval Commander James Mason. Seems as though he was given a Mickey Finn and left with false orders in his pocket that led to his ship being sunk by the Nazis. Now cashiered from the Royal Navy, Mason's looking for answers. So is Joyce Howard who is over from Canada looking for her girlfriend who has disappeared. She finds the girlfriend's corpse with Mason in a mysterious house.After this They Met In The Dark is a variation on what Alfred Hitchcock did much better with The Thirty Nine Steps. In fact the method used by the bad guy spies for transmitting messages involves a theatrical performer. I guess I'm not used to seeing James Mason in material as light as this. He and Howard do have some good chemistry. When he would do Hitchcock in North By Northwest he was not the light leading man there.Not one of Mason's classic films, but something different.
malcolmgsw This spy film seems to have used every cliché from spy films made earlier in World War 2.In particular it seems to have taken much of the story line of "Let George Do It".In particular it uses the encoding of messages into music.There is the fake court martial ling of Mason,the drugging of a signals officer and a spy ring in a port,and of course the obligatory missing corpse.All done in a most lacklustre fashion.At just over 90 minutes the story drags along.Compare it with Hitchcocks " Saboteur" made the same year in Hollywood.It looks as if the film was originally longer but was cut before release.i was looking forward to seeing George Robey but his scenes as a pawnbroker were obviously cut.I think that Mason should have based his character on Formby's so he could have ended the film with a cheerful "turned out nice again".
blanche-2 The career that James Mason had before being discovered by Hollywood was quite prolific. Thanks to TCM, audiences have had the opportunity to see some of his British films. This one, "They Met in the Dark," is a 1943 noir, and has both elements of drama and humor. The film begins with a trial, after which, found guilty of treason, Richard Heritage (Mason) is stripped of rank and thrown out of the Navy. He sets out, with one of his crew who believes in him, to prove his innocence. He backtracks, repeating his actions from the day he was arrested.He finds one woman (Patricia Medina) dead, another woman (Joyce Howard) positive that he had something to do with it, and a talent agent (Tom Walls) who has some interesting acts on his roster as well as a sophisticated singer (Phyllis Stanley).Mason is handsome, elegant, and vital in the lead role. He handles the lighter moments very well and has lots of charm. It's easy to see why he eventually went to Hollywood. Stanley does some nice singing, and Ronald Chesney plays a great harmonica.Different and enjoyable, with a good plot and British atmosphere that will keep the viewer interested.