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the audience applauded

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Fantastic!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Lively, Well Produced British War Time Spy-Thriller. With a Bigger Budget than usual, this Movie Stars Popular and Charming Actor Robert Donat on a Mission to Destroy a Nazi Chemical Weapons Plant...Single Handedly.Donat, Turns it Up, maybe a notch too much sometimes, as an Effeminate Flake of an Engineer with Wild Gestures and Over Emoting. But the Nazis are Dumb Brutes and can also be Swooned Easily by a Skirt.Helen Hobson is the Love Interest, and also an Integral Part of the Suspenseful Story, and Her Hat, here, is Legendary. The Film Wavers from Extremely Emotional (Acts 1 and 2) to Silly at times, to Super Spy Stuff that in Act 3 Really Kicks. When the Tone is not being Shattered by Over the Top Characterizations it is an Entertaining and Effective Propaganda Picture with Outstanding Scenes. Like when Donat meets the Underground and the Sprawling and Ominous Chemical Plant Finale.

During WW2, Robert Donat (Tartu) is selected to act as a British agent with the mission to blow up a factory that is making poisonous gas for the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. He is to assume the identity of a Rumanian Nazi sympathizer by the name of Jan Tartu and papers are organized so that he can pass himself off in his new identity. However, he has to make contact with the Resistance whilst in Czechoslovakia and this proves difficult as things don't work out too well on meeting his contact. Can he succeed with his mission? The acting is good and Donat plays his Romanian character as a bit of a cheerful fool – Donat the Doughnut. He convinces the Nazis but has more difficulties with the Resistance. Valerie Hobson (Lanova) plays a Nazi sympathiser who is lodging at the same house as Donat but is she what she seems? Factory worker Glynis Johns (Paula) is also at the house.The film has a story that keeps you watching and at the end it turns into a bit of a James Bond adventure as Donat has to do some pretty miraculous things all in the name of action sequences. There are also some hard-hitting scenes where Donat has to remain in character in order not to blow his cover. Unfortunately, the sound is pretty poor in this film so the dialogue is not always clear but it is manageable. One word of advice – don't let Valerie Hobson take off her hat.

My first hint that this movie was great was an early scene between Robert Donat and the actress who plays his mother, Mabel Terry-Lewis. It was so moving I busted out crying! Glynis Johns has a small but affecting and effective role.The statements made about Czechoslovakia were even more poignant, now that we know the country's history.The movie has a nice, fast pace that modern movie-goers will appreciate. Donat plays each of his secret identities with a confident, warm-hearted air.I usually hate chase scenes but the only one in this film was truly exciting.TCM advertised this movie as Sabotage Agent, so keep an eye out for it under that title. You won't be disappointed.

THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU, aka SABOTAGE AGENT contains some of the most wonderfully silly propaganda to survive WW2. In the darkest days of the war, British propaganda used every means possible to raise the moral of the British people. Char women would go to France and destroy gestapo headquarters. Churchill's friend and a member of the Royal family disobeyed orders and lost his ship and this became the uber heroic IN WHICH WE SERVE. Lesle Howard, a real life secret agent, reprised the Baroness Orczy character in Nazi held Europe as Pimpernel Smith. While full scale efforts against Germany in Norway, Greece and France were full scale disasters, the notion in propaganda films was that one man could wreak almighty justice upon the Nazi monster.In SABOTAGE AGENT aka ADVENTURES OF TARTU, the slight and sickly Robert Donat is gotten up as a master war hero. He is introduced as a cool headed, cold blooded bomb disposal expert who is drafted into being flown to Romania in the disguise of a well known (but dead) Rumanian near do well, giving Donat a chance to do a stereotypical and quite insulting imitation of what some more offensive Englishmen would call a 'greasy wog'. As a repulsive womanizing slime ball who is also a high ranking member of the Rumanian equivalent of the fascists, it doesn't take long before Donat has presented himself at a Czechoslovakian factory producing poison gas. It is Donat's mission to blow up the factory before they can ship the gas which he does escaping with his new girlfriend and assorted helpers and contacts in a stolen JU-88 .Its been said that when Goebbels saw British propaganda he was so thrilled that it was so crude because that meant German propaganda was so superior. In the end, of course, the quality of propaganda had no effect on the war. Except for seven films, all German propaganda films were made to lull the population into a sense of well being by NOT focusing on the issue at hand (the war). The British preferred to show how they were prevailing (which they weren't) and would prevail over the enemy. In other words - lies all around.The reality was very different. Nationalists su generis hate each other nationalities, even their allies, and the Germans were quite contemptuous of the Rumanians who were considered unreliable in battle. They wouldn't have allowed one no matter how puffed up their CV and references were within a million miles of a top secret project. The Germans are seen as a bunch of horny buffoons easily outsmarted with out their being any sense of the systematic rings of security and cumbersome but defensive bureaucracy surrounding a military occupation.Attempts at sabotage in Czechoslovakia by organized resistance, particularly in the Skodawerk were met with mass reprisal, particularly at the Skoda werk. The most famous operation in Czechoslovakia was the assassination of the Reich protector Heidrich, which was carried out, for political reasons, by members of the Czechoslovakian Army parachuted in for the task which resulted in repression so serious that the Czech resistance was effectively eliminated as a fighting force for the rest of the war and the town of Lidice was destroyed, the men murdered, the women and children scattered and the town razed and plowed under. The incident was so notorious in its time, plays, operas, poetry and at least two films (HANGMEN ALSO DIE, directed by Fritz Lang and HITLER'S MADMAN, directed by Douglas Sirk, were made of the story. The free world swore to remember Lidice forever. It forgot. And poison gas, the Germans had plenty of it which, even to the end, they didn't use in battle. Except on Jews in the Concentrations Camps.Such isn't the concern of the propaganda film however. What's needed is one guy with a steel resolves, good nerves and a bit of luck on his side. A briefcase full of little bombs are enough to take out a whole mountainside. Today the ideal hero, or 'Good Guy' would be SFX'd committing visually unlikely and physically impossible deeds to a crashingly loud soundtrack a la MISSION IMPOSSIBLE or others of that ilk. This is the ancestor of those super action heros, when there was still a lingering illusion that somehow he'd be, well, a gentleman. Hence Donat and not Schwarzenegger or Stallone shows up.The weirdest thing I found about the film is the escape. I've looked at the film multiple times and I can't figure out from certain shots if they were somehow using a real JU-88 or a mock -up. Would they, in circa 1942-43, take the time and expense to make a flyable JU-88, or did they actually have a flyable one on hand? I can piece out how they might have gotten a hold of one and why they would want to keep it flyable. (One was flown to Great Britain in May 1943). And was the 'they' behind this project MGM or either or both the British and American governments? The director and writers were from Hollywood though the film was made in London and all of the technicians were British. Some shots of the JU-88 could be a miniature (when the plane is seen flying into a cloud), some could be file film (the JU-88 is first seen in a rear projection process shot), some shots could be made using a full scale mock up (very expensive) and even be made to appear to be taxiing, but there are some other shots that could only be made by a flyable airframe. A Beaufort Bomber had been used for a few seconds in the beginning of the film and I thought one could have been given some cosmetic surgery but the long nacelles for the Junkers Jumo engines behind their large radial radiators are pretty unmistakable. Apparently the propaganda films could be somewhat cheesy as film but never cheep.