The film opens in 1944 at an embassy affair in neutral Turkey. The German ambassador, von Papen, slips out of the ballroom where the soprano is carrying on about the ride of the Valkyries, remarking, "Wagner makes me sick," and chats with Danielle Darrieux, a wealthy French countess who has been chased from France to Poland to England by falling bombs. She pleads with von Papen for money. She'll do anything to regain her estate and its treasures. She can be very beguiling. She can be a spy. Von Papen excuses himself politely and leaves. Another guest is standing nearby, eyeballing Darrieux. She sneers a little and tells him, "Please, don't stand there staring at me as if you were worth more than your salary."
Good old, literate Joseph Mankiewitz, the writer and director who gave us "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride." Most of the good lines are given to James Mason as the British Ambassador's valet in Ankara. Valets, like most servants, are given what the sociologist Erving Goffman called "non-person treatment." They're regarded as items of convenience of pieces of furniture, and they know enough to keep family secrets. Mason, as "Cicero", his code name in German Intelligence, knows enough to keep family secrets too. He also knows enough to get the combination to the embassy's safe, remove valuable documents, photograph them, and sell them to German agents, no matter how dubious those German agents might be. They continue to suspect that he's a British double agent and they fail to act on his information, even the time and place of the D-Day landings on Normandy.
There are several double crosses, which I won't describe in detail. When Mason has all the money he thinks he needs to live like a gentleman in Rio de Janeiro with his former employer, Darrieux, as his mistress, she runs off to Switzerland with all the dough. And when Mason finally reaches Rio and stands on his veranda in the evening breeze, drinking high-falutin' wine, an incident takes place that I don't believe because I think it may have been ripped off from "The Lavender Hill Mob."
In the end it's a tale of morality. The moral is: Make sure you pay your charwoman enough so that she doesn't take a Minox camera to the material you've stashed in the family vault.
Good old, literate Joseph Mankiewitz, the writer and director who gave us "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride." Most of the good lines are given to James Mason as the British Ambassador's valet in Ankara. Valets, like most servants, are given what the sociologist Erving Goffman called "non-person treatment." They're regarded as items of convenience of pieces of furniture, and they know enough to keep family secrets. Mason, as "Cicero", his code name in German Intelligence, knows enough to keep family secrets too. He also knows enough to get the combination to the embassy's safe, remove valuable documents, photograph them, and sell them to German agents, no matter how dubious those German agents might be. They continue to suspect that he's a British double agent and they fail to act on his information, even the time and place of the D-Day landings on Normandy.
There are several double crosses, which I won't describe in detail. When Mason has all the money he thinks he needs to live like a gentleman in Rio de Janeiro with his former employer, Darrieux, as his mistress, she runs off to Switzerland with all the dough. And when Mason finally reaches Rio and stands on his veranda in the evening breeze, drinking high-falutin' wine, an incident takes place that I don't believe because I think it may have been ripped off from "The Lavender Hill Mob."
In the end it's a tale of morality. The moral is: Make sure you pay your charwoman enough so that she doesn't take a Minox camera to the material you've stashed in the family vault.