george sanders

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

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I was recently in New Orleans for GalaxyCon 2025, so Brandon and I took advantage of being in the same place to go see the new James Gunn Superman and recorded a podcast about both it and M3GAN 2.0. Before we parted ways, he asked if I would be interested in joining him for The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Foreign Correspondent, and I’m glad that I was able to check it out. This isn’t the Master of Suspense at the very top of his game, but it’s damn near it. 

It’s 1939, the final days before WWII, and crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) has been rechristened as “Huntley Haverstock” by the editor of the New York Morning Globe and sent to Europe to report on conditions there as well as interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman). Upon arrival, Jones/Haverstock immediately becomes smitten with the beautiful Carol (Laraine Day), but not before accidentally insulting her and her father Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), the leader of the Universal Peace Party. Carol ultimately steps in as a speaker at the event where Jones planned to interview Van Meer, as the statesman is stated to have taken ill. When Jones meets him again in Amsterdam at the next stop on his tour, Van Meer seems not to recognize him and is gunned down by an assassin posing as a photographer moments later. A chase ensues as the car Jones commandeers to pursue the killer is driven by British reporter Scott ffolliott (George Sanders, of All About Eve) and he is accompanied by none other than Carol Fisher. The car bearing the murderer away seems to suddenly disappear when the group enters a stretch of road that crosses a vast field, unoccupied save for abandoned windmills. Jones decides to search about on foot while Scott and Carol attempt to catch up to the police, and although he discovers the hidden car and that Van Meer has actually been spirited away for interrogation while a duplicate was killed in his stead, by the time the police arrive, all evidence is gone. 

After recently watching the rather dour Frenzy (and following up this screening with a viewing of another dry Hitch picture, Topaz), the comedy in this one is refreshing. There’s a lot of hay made about the spelling of Scott’s last name, which is deliberately left un-capitalized. This is apparently a real English gentry practice, as the lack of consistent usage of capital letters across large swathes of British history meant that some documents utilized a double letter at the beginning of a name to indicate that it was a proper noun. When a more standardized capitalization scheme came about, some families worried that if their names were updated they might lose some deed or other if they were named “Folliott” and not “ffolliott.” Sanders is playing a wonderfully unconcerned dandy of a man who’s having a lot of fun with all of this espionage rigamarole, and although he’s serious when the moment demands it, he brings a light energy to the proceedings that is much appreciated given the subject matter. There’s also a delightful appearance from Edmund Gwenn (who would appear as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street seven years later) as a babbling, inept would-be assassin who’s sicced on Jones by the film’s twist villain. Rowley is theoretically supposed to act as Jones’s bodyguard but instead plans to lead him to his death, in a sequence that culminates in the steeple of a towering church, where Rowley’s attempts to push Jones to his doom are repeatedly interrupted by other sightseers and tourists. Jones and Carol are also quite charming together, even if it takes a while to move them past her initial antipathy toward him and their courtship, once this is surmounted, moves a bit too fast. 

The tension here is excellently done as well. The scene in which Jones sneaks around in the windmill and discovers the real Van Meer is very tautly directed, as is the scene in which Jones must sneak from one upper-story hotel room on an elevated floor to another in order to escape being silenced. Both are spectacular, but nothing can top the film’s climax, when Carol, Scott, Jones, and the apprehended antagonist/instigator are en route back to the United States just as WWII breaks out in Europe. Their commercial airliner is almost immediately shot at by a German U-boat and goes down, and the sequence is utterly marvelous, like something out of Final Destination. One unfortunate woman stands to voice her distress at the situation and her intent to contact the British consulate as soon as the plane lands, only to be shot to death by bullets that pierce the fuselage mid-sentence. Aside from a potentially improbable number of survivors, the plane crash is frighteningly realistic, and it put me slightly on edge given that I had a flight out of MSY that same day. At the film’s climax, Jones delivers an impassioned plea over the radio that resonates just as much now as it did then, even if no one ever uses the word “fascism” outright. 

The romance in this one is decent. It lacks the passion of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or the slow smolder between Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. There are elements of Notorious here in the parallels between Carol here and Ingmar Bergman’s Alicia in that film, but to say more would spoil a major plot point. This one is pretty close in the Hitchcock timeline to his 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes, and the romance here plays out at the same accelerated pace as Lady, with the major difference being that the romantic couple in that film spent most of their screentime together investigating and their natural chemistry was a strong factor in selling the breakneck romance. McCrea is fantastic as a leading man, even if he was Hitchcock’s second choice (after Gary Cooper), and he’s great in all of his scenes, while Laraine Day is absolutely delightful as Carol Fisher, but the two spend just a touch too little time together on screen to sell it completely, and as such they never quite mesh despite each individual actor’s excellence. Sanders’s ffolliott is also very fun here, and is the perfect comedic relief that the film occasionally needs, when that role isn’t being fulfilled by Rowley falling out of a steeple. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Island of the Damned

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One of the most underappreciated cul-de-sacs in horror cinema is the 1950s & 60s British thriller that turned expansive premises with global implications into bottled-up, dialogue-heavy teleplays. Sci-fi horror classics like Devil Girl from Mars, The Day of the Triffids, and The Earth Dies Screaming executed big ideas on constricted budgets in excitingly ambitious ways, even if they often amounted to back-and-forth philosophical conversations in parlors & pubs. It’s difficult to imagine so, but our current Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? has strong roots in one of the most iconic examples of this buttoned-up British tradition – the 1964 chiller Village of the Damned. What’s most amazing about that influence is that the calmer, more dialogue-heavy example of the pair is somehow just as disturbing as its ultraviolent descendent. Even working under harsh financial restraints & systemic moral censorship in a more conservative time for horror cinema, Village of the Damned holds its own against the free-to-shock grindhouse nasties that followed in its wake.

It’s not that Village of the Damned was the only killer-children horror film that could or would have influenced Who Can Kill a Child?. From the classier Evil Children artifacts like Rosemary’s Baby & The Bad Seed to schlockier contemporaries like It’s Alive! & Kill Baby Kill, it’s remarkably rich thematic territory that’s been mined countless times before & since. Still, there’s something about the way the concept is handled in Village of the Damned that directly correlates to Who Can Kill a Child?, particularly in the two films’ opening acts. They both begin with the eerie quiet of a vacated city where the adults have been neutralized (in Who Can Kill a Child? because they were massacred, in Village of the Damned because they were gassed by alien invaders). Both films dwell on the mystery of those vacant rural-village settings for as long as possible before revealing that their central antagonists will be murderous children. Those children may have different respective supernatural abilities (the ones of Who Can Kill a Child? are unusually athletic & muscular while the toe-headed cherubs of Village of the Damned are hyper-inteligent), but they share a common penchant for telepathic communication that leaves their adult victims out of the loop. Most importantly, Village of the Damned concludes with its main protagonist (veteran stage actor George Sanders) making the “heroic” decision to kill a classroom full of children to save the planet, which touches on the exact thematic conflict referenced in its unlikely decedent’s title.

There are, of course, plenty of ways that Who Can Kill a Child? mutates & reconfigures the Village of the Damned template instead of merely copying it (lest it suffer the same fate as John Carpenter’s tepid 90s remake). Instead of the killer children being a set number of alien invaders in a small village, they’re instead a growing number of infectious revolutionaries who can recruit more tykes into their adult-massacring cause – making their eventual escape from their island home a global threat. Since the sensibilities of the horror genre in general has changed drastically between the two films – from teleplays to gore fests – Who Can Kill a Child? also translates the earlier film’s “The Birds except with Children” gimmick to more of a hyperviolent George Romero scenario. Surprisingly, though, the most pronounced difference between the two works is their respective relationships with the military. In Village of the Damned, the British military is a force for patriotic good against an invading space alien Other – who trigger post-War trauma over entire communities being gassed & destroyed. Who Can Kill a Child? is much, much tougher on military activity, framing its entire children’s-revenge-on-adults scenario as retribution for the way it’s always children who suffer most for adults’ war crimes. That makes this gory Spanish mutation of the buttoned-up British original the exact right kind of cinematic descendent – the kind that’s in active conversation with its predecessors instead of merely copying them.

Who Can Kill a Child? is less restrained than Village of the Damned in terms of its politics & its violence, but both films are on equal footing in terms of bone-deep chills—which speaks to the power of the teleplay-style writing & acting of 1960s British horror. Village of the Damned is nowhere near the flashiest nor the most audacious entry in the Evil Children subgenre, but it is an incredibly effective one that plays just as hauntingly today as it did a half century ago. It’s like being locked in a deep freezer for 77minutes of pure panic, so it makes sense that it’d have a wide-reaching influence on films that don’t either share its sense of restraint nor its politics.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? , check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet