Ed. note: For The American Scholar, I write a monthly column under the general title of "talking pictures" about movies worth seeing and talking about. Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest effort. -- DL
<<< The Counterfeit Traitor is an underrated espionage classic in the same league as an early Eric Ambler novel or a Warner Brothers ’40s flick, albeit one set on location and in color. My best guess for why it is underrated is that the hero (William Holden) and heroine (Lilli Palmer) do not conform to accepted norms. They are played not by an all-American boy and golden girl but by two attractive and capable, if decidedly middle-aged, adults. Holden, who plays protagonist Eric “Red” Erickson, was 44 in 1962. Palmer, cast with her mitteleuropa beauty and charm as Frau Marianne von Mollendorf, Erickson’s clandestine confederate in Berlin, was 48.
Like the patron of Rick’s Cafe Américain in Casablanca, the hero of The Counterfeit Traitor does not begin the Second World War as the champion of a cause. He must be converted, and Frau von Mollendorf is his catalyst, converting the American-born, Cornell-educated Swedish industrialist from reluctant spy to committed freedom fighter.
Erickson, an oil exporter who has continued to trade with Germany after hostilities began in September 1939, has aimed for a stance of political neutrality. But he has been denounced as a Nazi collaborator, and now Allied Intelligence, led by the sardonic British agent Collins (Hugh Griffith), wants him to play the role with a vengeance. Repeating ugly shibboleths and breaking off relations with his best friend, a Jew, Erickson gains credibility among Nazi higher-ups, enabling him to gather vital information on German oil production facilities.
Not for the first time in his Hollywood career does Holden portray a resourceful skeptic that the Allies need to recruit despite his reluctance to join the fray. As in The Bridge on the River Kwai, his character needs to have his arm twisted hard. (See my Talking Pictures piece “William Holden, Model Prisoner” on William Holden in two lauded movies of the 1950s.) You might call Erickson disillusioned, but he doesn’t appear to have illusions in the first place. Virtually coerced into the role of counterfeit traitor, Erickson sums up his situation thus: “So you want me to risk my life to get off a blacklist I didn’t deserve to be on in the first place?”
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I first grasped the importance of a pocket square with three wings in a man’s breast pocket when I saw William Holden wear one at a cocktail party in The Counterfeit Traitor. And it was watching the movie as a 14-year-old that I realized for the first time that the hopelessness of a love affair accentuates its romantic and sexual intensity. >>>
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