Secret People

A film mostly remembered for featuring Audrey Hepburn in her first major film role (and the only film in this collection in which she appears), Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People deserves a reputation well beyond Hepburn, whose role as the protagonist’s younger sister is fairly minor. An engrossing mélange of noir, war, and spy film elements, the film stars Italian actress Valentina Cortese in her third noir (Thieves’ Highway, 1949; The House on Telegraph Hill, 1951) as Maria Brentano, the daughter of a high-profile pacifist who is put to death by a dictator named Galbern (presumably modeled on Franco or Mussolini); Galbern has taken over her unspecified country and sent her and her sister, aspiring ballerina Nora (Hepburn), seeking refuge in London. Soon after, Maria bumps into her childhood sweetheart Louis (Serge Reggiani), who, she later learns, is leading a plot to assassinate Galbern during his upcoming visit to London. Despite her initial resistance, Louis plays on Maria’s grief and anger to persuade her not only to participate in the plot but to smuggle in the bomb that will take him out. Things go very wrong, which sends Maria to the hospital, then into police custody, then into a fake identity, the story’s conclusion both shocking and slightly unsatisfying. The film wants to study the potency of ideology, specifically how easily human beings will violate moral law in the name of moral righteousness (“They don’t mind who they kill”), but it also showcases some splendid artistry from Dickinson and crew through overall atmospherics and several inventively shot sequences, such as the sensory montage that precedes Maria’s waking up in the hospital bed or, most impressively, when Maria first meets with Louis’ accomplices, who remain faceless and disembodied behind shadows and oblique camera angles, a masterful construction of the noir ethos that doubles down on the film’s title.