…In fact as in fiction, the spy is the indispensable person of our time. Yet their activity poses a deadly threat to the open society…
…In all secret service literature, fiction and nonfiction alike, there is an ambiguous and extremely complex relationship between myth and reality. Such a relationship exists, indeed, within the covert organizations themselves. Somerset Maugham, who served in the British Secret Intelligence During World War I, was probably the first modern writer to be struck by the tendency of the secret service to imitate art-the art of the popular thriller. This phenomenon, which might be termed the Ashenden Effect after the eponymous hero of Maugham’s semiautobiographical espionage tales, was since confirmed by a number of other writers of secret service fiction- most notably Graham Greene and Compton Mackenzie- who themselves had actual secret service experience.
—Adapted from the Ashenden stories by Somerset Maugham, Secret Agent is one of Hitchcock’s few comedy-thrillers. Reunited with the talented team of screenwriter Charles Bennett and actress Madeleine Carroll from his earliest success, The 39 Steps, Hitchcock creates an espionage adventure imbued with laugh-out-loud humour and Hitch’s trademark thrills.
Celebrated writer and war hero, Edgar Brodie, is approached by British Intelligence to go undercover as a spy with the mission of tracking down and killing an enemy agent in Switzerland.—click image for source…
Thus the writer of spy thrillers or romanticized secret service history and the real-life covert operator are dialectical partners. The former, by glamorizing the secret agent, creates an archetype upon which the ladder tends to model his professional behavior, and they in turn authenticate the writer’s fantasy. This dialectic goes a long way to ward explaining the hold the secret agent has acquired on the popular imagination.
For the secret agent is more than a collective fantasy exploited for entertainment, like such comparable, if dated, synthetic folk heroes as the cowboy, the great detective, and the gang-buster. Entertainment is only their cover. Though it is hard to write about them, or even think about them, without mentally putting one’s tongue in one’s cheek, they are not really a figure of fun. More and more they appear to be assuming the role of a culture hero in the true sense: a mythical personification of the aspirations and ideals of a society, or, if not a whole society, a dangerously large segment of one- specifically ours.
—Secret Agent is Hitchcock suspense picture of three British spies recruited at the height of The Great War on a mission together and how all three through turn of events their morals clash in attempting to execute a murderous deed for their country. On a secret mission during WWI British intelligence dispatch three spies to Switzerland in search of a German spy. Primarily centered around Richard Ashenden (John Gielgud), a new recruit with a well educated past and experience as a loyal soldier during the war, his death is faked as a by the British army so that he can serve out incognito for his country. He is joined by Elsa (Madeleine Carroll), an eager woman who took the role as spy in search of adventure, acting as his wife while on mission, and an eccentric Mexican gentlemen known simply as “The General” (Peter Lorre), he too sent to help in the aid of stopping this mysterious German.—click image for source…
Perhaps even more disquieting, as the hero’s mythical stature grows, the moral values they incarnate seem to degenerate. James Bond is a more sinister figure than the gentlemanly amateur agents with whom John Buchan’s readers identified, and E. Howard Hunt’s Peter Ward is in several respects still worse, since it exhibited a moral nihilism mixed with paranoia and self-righteousness. in one story, a the prescient line reflects the whole Watergate mess: “We become lawless in the struggle for the rule of the law.”
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