I don't know that I would call Stephen Fisher my favorite Hitchcock villain, but he has lingered with and troubled me for years, which makes him worth the contemplation.

On one level, he may be nothing more than a side effect of the shifting conditions of Foreign Correspondent (1940). Produced just as the phony war was turning into the real thing, the film undergoes a corresponding transformation over the course of its runtime from a pre-war light thriller in its director's own tradition to an urgent piece of up-to-the-minute propaganda as blunt as a broken fourth wall—thirty-nine steps to London after dark in two genre-jolting hours. The farther the eve of war ticks down to midnight, the more clearly the reality of Germany emerges from the Ruritanian static of Borovia, the MacGuffin of Clause 27 falls by the wayside of the headlines of September 1, 1939. As the seat-of-the-pants screwball of jungled umbrellas and prevailing windmills levels out into the cat-and-mouse of classically amateur espionage, the dialogue begins to admit the existence of blackouts and bomb shelters in London. So perhaps does Fisher clarify from an urbanely professional traitor to a deep-cover patriot, one more mask peeled off the depths to which we must recognize the enemy will keep sinking. His Universal Peace Party isn't merely a well-veneered campaign for appeasement, it's a front for strong-arm tactics as brutal as they are surreal, blasting a drugged and kidnapped man with photoflood lighting and big-band jazz. The crudity of personally arranging a murder dismays him as much as the necessity of participating in an interrogation and he sets to it as smoothly as he addresses the audiences who really believe in his conscientious objections. The warning he imparts to the American reporter unwittingly on his trail would give him away to anyone with an ear for double-speaking when he characterizes the hijackers of a prominent anti-fascist statesman as "cunning, unscrupulous—and inspired," but even his daughter who finally comes to suspect him of treason doesn't go so far as to imagine that he might never have owed his allegiance to the country they have lived in all her life. "I've just been worried," she confesses aboard the America-bound clipper they boarded narrowly ahead of the official declaration of war, "but I believed in you." Quick as if it hurts him, her father shakes his head: "You shouldn't."

A Hitchcock veteran if not a regular, Herbert Marshall had starred for the director as a conscience-stricken juror turned amateur detective in Murder! (1930) and lost none of his gentlemanly attraction over the intervening decade even as he eased out of the romance of a leading man; it puts his Fisher at first in a class with Professor Jordan of The 39 Steps (1935) or Phillip Vandamm of North by Northwest (1959), well-mannered, well-respected, well-connected men for whom the business of treason may require certain sacrifices at second hand but never compromise itself with such interference as personal feeling. Well after we've seen his duplicity in action, he remains courteous, humorous, never so controlled that he looks untouchable. His distaste for the harsher aspects of his work may be nothing more than squeamishness when he's willing to let other men bloody their hands with them. His reluctance to involve his daughter in his subversive activities does suggest more conscience than self-preservation when his right-hand man notes the additional difficulties of working around her, but even as he realizes she loves the man he's just sent off to meet with an unfortunate accident, he restrains himself from calling off the hit. Beyond the dramatic shock value and the careless-talk paranoia of wartime, it never made any sense to me that he should turn out to be ethnically German. Nothing about the mechanics of the plot would alter if Fisher were exactly what he seemed from the revelation of his perfidy, a well-bred Englishman whose Nazi sympathies have made it worth his while to promote a disingenuous pacifism while working with foreign agents to help them obtain "a piece of information that would be very valuable to the enemy in the war that breaks out tomorrow, weather permitting." All the twist adds is a dash of xenophobia and a strange complexity which there is barely time left to explore before the flying boat hits the water and the film its entreating epilogue. What I had missed was the previous war's phenomenon of spy fever as recently discussed by philomytha—the specter of German sleeper agents seeded throughout Britain in the most innocuous and naturalized guises which consumed not only popular literature but civilian imagination and official decisions as the country hurtled into World War I. It had not occurred to me that Foreign Correspondent could have been produced so near the outbreak of hostilities proper that it would draw more on the tropes of the older war because the newer ones had not yet been established. If it were still gearing up to the latest in propaganda, however, it would account for the otherwise curious sympathy the film extends to its not even honorable enemy with a generosity reminiscent of erstwhile war pictures as recent as Powell and Pressburger's The Spy in Black (1939) and unthinkable by the time Hitchcock returned to World War II with Saboteur (1942), whose Nazi agents really are the home-grown fifth columnists that Fisher only resembles. There's no percentage in it, nationalistically speaking. But there is a remarkable pain in the speech he makes to the daughter he loves more than anything else in his double life, the last illusions of which he is forced to disabuse her before they leave the charmed space of the air and the justice of the war-fired earth catches up to him:

"Carol, I've got to talk to you. I don't want to, but I've got to. It's the hardest part of the whole thing, talking to you now. I don't mind about the rest, really . . . I'm to be arrested when we land. As a spy. Shipped back to London. That's quite all right, except just the one phase of it—you. That's why I've got to talk to you. I should like you to think of me a little from my own point of view. It might help you, afterwards. First about yourself, my deceiving you. I had to, you know, I didn't want you involved in any part of it because you're English—half English, anyway—I'm not, I'm just coated with an English accent. It's a very thin coat. I've fought for my country in my heart in a very difficult way because sometimes it's harder to fight dishonorably than nobly in the open. And I've used my country's methods because I was born with them. I don't intend making this sort of plea to the court-martial. I'm making it only to my daughter whom I've loved dearly and before whom I feel a little ashamed."

It is not an absolution. Even allowing for how much the divers hands of the screenplay would not have known about Nazism in 1940, Fisher remains off north of the moral compass by the sheer fact that whatever he may have done to his discredit, what he's sorriest about is the hurt he's caused his daughter by getting caught. Even so, just the way his sure-footed public speaker's voice suddenly stutters, stumbles as if in spite of itself into lines like a very thin coat suggests some more troubled history of assimilation and alienation than mere loyalty of blood and soil, neither the dispassionate mastermind nor the fanatical dupe; it takes him out of archetype and into his own unanswerable and problematic self without which he could not be let out of the film heroically, for his daughter to find strength in his memory even as she agrees to the publication of his crimes. "My father fought for his country his way. It wasn't a straight way, but it was a hard way. And I've got to fight for my country—the hard way." On the other side of the war, this figure of the Nazi's daughter will become the much more compromised heroine of Notorious (1946), shape-shifting herself to make up for her father's shame. Here at its beginning, he can still be saluted as much as watched out for, the enemy who is so very like ourselves.

Because the film changed so often in production as world-historical events around it did the same, I cannot tell without research if Fisher was always intended to take the shape he did, but the net result is that for all the vivid, often dream-logical images with which Foreign Correspondent supplies its viewer, from a lethal camera-flash to a rice-paper shatter of sea, the only character who holds up comparably in my memory is George Sanders' Scott ffolliott, the amiably ambiguous co-lead who can explicate the niceties of Tudor decapitalization during a car chase, essay an improvisation in counterterrorism as if he's filing copy, and launch himself out of a hotel window into an awning full of rain with the same aplomb with which he leaves instructions to cancel his rhumba lesson, none of which protects him from fear or embarrassment or danger of his life. It fits him into the chiaroscuro, off-kilter and no joke. The weird little not so lesser light that is Foreign Correspondent would be even stronger if the same could be said of Joel McCrea's Johnny Jones or Laraine Day's Carol Fisher. Their blatantly allegorical endgame is a mutual awakening from the sidelines of their innocence in order to exchange it for a common responsibility—fighting Nazis—but however sincerely they speedrun a romance or broadcast while the bombs fall, they never really pick up the ambivalence in which their shared ally thrives as much as their poignant antagonist, the signature of their split, startling world. If it was an accident of history, so much the better. It ends up feeling like the most real thing. Perhaps I return to Fisher simply because I can't explain him, as in life he never tried to explain himself. "Thanks," he dryly acknowledges a refusal to condemn him totally, seconds from the irony of enemy action that will overturn the state of play once again. "It's a minority report, but very welcome." This coat brought to you by my hard backers at Patreon.