Excellent, hugely realistic WW2 thriller.

A truly remarkable film for its' time when WW2 was still yesterday's news and its' grim realities were still universally accepted. You wonder if today's audiences would be prepared to accept the extreme subterfuge, moral ambiguities and agonising judgement calls such a conflict would demand? Should they simply arrest the Nazi agent or use him to feed false information to the Germans about the liberation of Europe even if this means endangering the other agents working alongside him? Should the French resistance fighters trust Cagney's character in his claim to be an Allied agent or simply execute him as a quisling? How far should they go in collaborating with the Germans to maintain their cover against helping the Allies? To judge by some of the controversy surrounding the 'War on Terror' I would venture no?

James Cagney is excellent here, probably happy to ditch his gangster persona and be able to demonstrate his martial arts prowess as a judo black belt during the training sequences. Of the supporting cast the Nazi agent is very good, really convincing you by his ingenuity in the theft exercise sequence, maybe they should have left his real identity a mystery until later in the film? The clean cut all American boy by contrast is unceremoniously killed off-screen, plummeting to his death due to a sabotaged parachute line, in a lesser film he would have been the hero but the cynical message here is that his sort of naivety is fatal as is the romantic attachment of the French agent to her missing husband (you really suspected her of being the Nazi spy, blackmailed by threats to him into working for them).

The training sequences at the OSS are very realistic and whilst they may seem clichéd now you must remember they must have been a revelation to the audiences of 1947 (as the intro explains the OSS was a revolutionary departure for the US intelligence services, achingly liberal America hugely reluctant to create the same sort of spy agency as other countries, it taking Pearl Harbour to jar the wider population from their complacency and understand the necessity).

Very ruthless for its' time, Cagney gives a big speech about how the Queensberry rules are out the window and that this is a fight to the finish. When he is later captured (his enemy prying the suicide pill from his hand) his erstwhile pupil reminds him of that speech as he is tortured. Cagney practices what he preaches, even killing men with his bare hands and later ends up being killed by his own side just to shut him up. EVERYONE dies, even the heroine which must have been very rare at the time.

So all told a realistic and impressively accurate representation of what the OSS got up to during WW2.