Absolutely Brilliant!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

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.

Cagney disappears in a tremendous explosion at the end of this movie, but he was to disintegrate even more gloriously a few years later.That's the sad part. We've grown to like Cagney as the head of the 077 Branch of U.S. Army Intelligence. He trains a new class of students in espionage and dirty tricks and then sends three of them (Frank Lattimore, Annabella, and Richard Conte) overseas on a dual mission. (1) Kidnap the Vichy French rat who has been designing the launching pads for the V-2 rockets. (2) Spread the false information that the Allies plan to land in Holland rather than Normandie. (PS: Kids, I have specified that the information about the landings in Holland was false, but in the interests of elucidation I'm compelled to add that this is World War II we're talking about here and, see, Hitler occupied France and the Allies -- meaning Britain, the U.S., and so forth -- had to keep their true plans secret. And -- and -- well, we won the war.) It turns out that Conte is, lamentably, a German agent, one of the best. He murders Lattimore, which, as far as cinematic history goes, isn't an insufferable loss, and then rejoins the Abwehr, having accomplished his mission, which was to learn all he could about the operations of Army Intelligence.But Lattimore must be replaced if the real two missions of the group are to be successful, and there's only one man who can do it -- Cagney himself. Cagney parachutes into France, kidnaps the Vichy rat and has him sent to England for questioning about the V-2s, and then is himself captured by Conte. Conte wants to know what those two original missions were. (I admit to a little confusion here about exactly who knows exactly what. Mission Number One, the spreading of false information, is dropped almost as soon as it's explained.) Well, Cagney is a tough guy, as we all know, but nobody can stand up to the Gestapo methods of enhanced interrogation. Every man has his breaking point. Before this point is reached, however, the U.S. Air Force bombs the living hell out of Gestapo headquarters and kills everyone in it, Cagney and Conte included.My guess is that a lot of instructive material about the 077 techniques was cut from the final print. We see the students being instructed in martial arts, demolition, radio communications, and so forth, but it would have been rather neat to learn how to burglarize a place.The rest of the film generates a lot of tension, along with scenes of camaraderie near the start. It results in a rather poignant moment aboard the airplane from which Lattimore and Conte will be parachuted into a French field. Conte has posed as a genial American, and Lattimore has formed a bond with him. Just before the mission is launched, Lattimore is by necessity told of Conte's real identity and is ordered to shoot him if he has to. While the two sit across from one another in the plane, waiting for the order to jump, Lattimore's guilt and discomfort can't be masked and Conte, ever on the alert, picks it up. It's a somewhat painful exchange because, after all, who wants to witness the end of a friendship? Maybe some small percentage of that male bonding was real, even for a person like Conte. It certainly seemed so. It's the finest moment in the film for both actors. Conte nevertheless doesn't hesitate to cut Lattimore's static line so that he falls to his death.The movie belongs to a relatively short-lived genre that originated towards the end of the war and lasted a few years. The style resembles a documentary. There is a narrator -- almost always, as here, Reed Hadley of the sonorous baritone. Lots of typed messages. Rows and rows of filing cabinets containing thousands of documents. Hidden identities. Most of them were produced by Louis de Rochemont and directed by Henry Hathaway. For a relatively pure example of the genre, see "The House on 92nd Street." In all of them, there are a number of highly dramatic and suspenseful moments but the mission is always accomplished.

This movie starts kind of slow, more of a documentary about the intelligence services than a drama.The plot is that Cagney is training a group of spies to help prepare for the landing in Europe. He discovers that one of his team is in fact a German spy, and they make the decision to use him in a disinformation campaign.Unfortunately, the spy catches on to the plan and kills the agent meant to keep an eye on him. This is where the plot actually starts to move, and Cagney parachutes into France to complete the mission.An interesting part in the beginning of the movie shows stock footage of Federal Agents rounding up German and Japanese citizens suspected of being spies. Today, we know that most of those people were innocent, but in 1947, this was still considered a good thing.

This "13 rue Madeleine " is the address of the gestapo's headquarters,the place where they tortured their prisoners.Hathaway's movie looks like the propaganda works which were thriving during WW2.French Annabella who lost a brother in the conflict was a committed actress who played for the soldiers on stage in Italy.It was the second time she had been cast in a WW2 movie (the first was "tonight we raid Calais" in 1943.Unfortunately she's (like all the actors) outstripped by James Cagney,and as soon as we know about her husband's fate ,her part is so underwritten she does not have a single chance to shine.The same goes for Richard Conte and Frank Latimore.In consequence,the most interesting part of the movie is its first part,almost a documentary ,which shows the training of the secret agents,with voice over galore.Then when the story really begins,after 30 min,it is sometimes confused and only the moving last scenes ,13 rue Madeleine,have a true emotional power.