Hotel Reserve

Unusually, a trio of directors — Lance Comfort, Mutz Greenbaum, and Victor Hanbury — collaborated on Hotel Reserve, a variation on the whodunit formula in which an accidental sleuth must discover which of the guests of a small inn is a secret Nazi spy. Based on an Eric Ambler novel and sharing story elements with other wartime thrillers like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s comedic The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942), Norman Foster’s Journey Into Fear (1943, also based on an Ambler work), and Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1944), the film stars James Mason as Peter Vadassy, a recent medical school graduate vacationing in France while he waits for his French citizenship to come through; one day, when he arrives at a photo processing shop to pick up the prints he ordered, he’s arrested for trespassing and espionage by French naval intelligence, who were alerted about top secret photos on his camera film. It turns out that someone with the same camera model is staying at his hotel, so intelligence officer Michel Beghin (Julien Mitchell) assigns Vadassy to find out who it is. The dozen or so guests/suspects include the shady, evasive Paul Heimberger (Frederick Vock) with the thick German accent, hotel proprietress Suzanne Koch (Lucie Mannheim), and newlyweds Andre (Herbert Lom) and Odette Roux (Patricia Medina). Some viewers will find the first half ‘s comic relief to be excessive (for example, the photo shoot of a shark during which the camera seems to pass gas), but most of the film unfolds inside the edges of noir, especially at night when Greenbaum, who also serves as cinematographer, heightens the tension with low-key lighting, high angles, and the like.