SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

robert-temple-1 This is a superb espionage film set early in the Cold War. Tyrone Power makes the perfect lead, because he always had that quality of looking innocent and puzzled in the trickiest of situations, inevitably summoning plenty of noble resolution while never looking worldly wise about it. In this story, he is a diplomatic courier working for the American State Department. It is his job to carry important diplomatic communications by hand from country to country. He carries them in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He wears two watches at once, one for the time at home and one for the time of his destination. However, Power becomes embroiled in a fantastically complicated espionage affair and ends up being used as a pawn in a complex game of intrigue which few can understand. He become involved with two mysterious women, who may or may not be femmes fatale. One is Patricia Neal, who plays a wealthy American widow on the make. She comes across as too good to be true, and for a while we suspect her of overacting. But then her true nature comes out, and we discover how evil she really is. When she starts playing her character's true self, she is terrifying. The other mysterious woman is played by the German actress Hildegard Neff, a mysterious beauty who was at the peak of her American popularity at this time. The film also features Karl Malden in a supporting role, where he is particularly good and shows the promise of his career which was to come. Much of the film is shot in Trieste, which one of the characters describes as being a hotbed of spies of all kinds, like Lisbon during the War. This film has a great deal of postwar atmosphere and suspense and is only one notch down from the more brilliant works of Hitchcock and Carroll Reed. The director was Henry Hathaway, an old pro who could make the telephone book look interesting, The film is full of double agents, betrayal, duplicity, baffling situations, and murder. The film moves at quite a pace and is never dull for a moment. The availability of this classic now on DVD is a welcome addition to the finer cinematic portrayals of early Cold War paranoia and deception. It is interesting historically as well as cinematically, and we get to see a lot of location shots which evoke the era.

bkoganbing For his one and only film in the espionage genre 20th Century Fox cast Tyrone Power as a Diplomatic Courier working for the State Department during the early Cold War years. In his position for the Department, Power gets a real hot assignment.The thing here is that Power is not an espionage agent, but he's to make contact with one in the person of James Millican who is bringing out of the Soviet Union nothing less than the plans to invade Yugoslavia which had declared its independence of the Warsaw Pact that involved the Soviets and their Eastern European satellites. Something that the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department would like to know.Millican gets killed by the Soviets, but they don't get the document and it becomes up to Power to find it, backed at a distance by the CIA in the form of Stephen McNally. There are two women in the picture, native Hildegarde Knef and American widow Patricia Neal and one of them is an enemy agent.Unfortunately Diplomatic Courier spills the beans a little too early for my taste and tells the audience just who is who among the women. Spoiled the film for me.A whole lot of soon to be prominent players had small bit roles in Diplomatic Courier, folks like E.G. Marshall, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin. Karl Malden has a much bigger role as a kind of sidekick assigned to Power by McNally.Diplomatic Courier is a dated, but still good espionage thriller from the Cold War giving Tyrone Power and the two female co-stars some very good roles.

JLRMovieReviews Tyrone Power is obviously, as the title suggests, a diplomatic courier. He is thrown into a new mission just after completing one and changes planes before he is given time to turn around. Exhausted, he promptly falls asleep, taking two seats, but Patricia Neal, the last one on, needs it and he ultimately sleeps on her shoulder.Right off the bat, they hit it off and have great chemistry. He would love to spend time with her, but he has his mission. This is a thoroughly engrossing espionage film that is a lot of fun and moves at a break-neck pace, with Ty constantly chasing the "bad guys" or being chased by them. Hildegarde Neff is great in a supporting role.I'm sure this is hard to find. (I taped it some time ago off Fox Movie Channel, and recently watched it.) But if you happen to catch it, you'll be very glad you did. Costarring Stephen MacNally and Karl Malden and with James Coburn and Charles Bronson in small roles, this is one good little film that should be discovered.

pnay75-1 I SAW THIS MOVIE IN THE 50s, but I remember that it was well played by Tyrone Power and Hildegarde Neff, with solid direction and good B&W photography.Charles Bronson ( uncredited ), had only a few seconds on the screen, but I remember vividly that he made a tremendous impression, and I was sure he would attain stardom.