Word: ashenden
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Secret Agent (Gaumont-British) introduces to U. S. cinema audiences a hero who should please them highly: Operative Ashenden of the British Intelligence Service, whose activities have been recorded so successfully in fiction by Author Somerset Maugham. Herein Ashenden (John Gielgud) is seen at the start of his career, stationed in Switzerland, where Author Maugham himself functioned as a Wartime spy. Detailed, with the assistance of a gruesome character known as the "Hairless Mexican" (Peter Lorre), to track down a German agent en route to Arabia, Ashenden proceeds with more pluck than perspicacity. Nonetheless, having inadvertently permitted the Hairless Mexican...
...contrast with oldtime fiction operatives like Sherlock Holmes, whose deductive gifts were superhuman, Ashenden belongs to the modern school of sleuths whose fallibility makes them plausible. In Secret Agent he scuffs about hotel corridors, deserted churches, glaciers, the backstairs of a chocolate factory, wearing an unhappy frown which is at times reminiscent of Charles Butterworth's. Spy Ashenden's behavior is, however, less of a hindrance than a help to the picture, is indicative of the enormity of the hostile forces with which he is trying to deal. Directed by England's pudgy master of melodrama, Alfred...
...Ashenden is not the only new cinema personage produced by Secret Agent. The picture also affords U. S. audiences a glimpse of the young actor who is currently London's favorite Hamlet. An elegantly slim young man upon whose emaciated face a formidable nose between gimlet eyes suggests the front of a streamlined car, John Gielgud is the 32-year-old great-nephew of the late great Ellen Terry. A product of Westminster, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and several years of British stock, he made his reputation in successive appearances as Romeo, Hamlet and King Lear at London...
Cakes and Ale: or The Skeleton in the Clipboard is a novel without a hero. Narrator is William Ashenden, middle-aged bachelor writer, through whose disillusioned eyes you see unfolded the story of Edward Drimeld and the lovely Rosie. When Edward Drimeld died his late-won position as Grand Old Man of English Letters was secure. His shrewd second wife wanted an official, respectably-mum-mifying biography, asked the popular novelist Alroy Rear to write it. But Ashenden was one of the few who knew anything about Driffield's early life. When Kear tried to pump him, Ashenden had reason...
...Ashenden was a boy when he first met Drimeld, then a struggling author, and Rosie, his beautiful barmaid wife. When the Driffields "shot the moon" (left town without paying their debts J, Ashenden thought he would never see them again. But years later, while a medical student in London, he met Rosie on the street, went home with her to tea, became an habitue of the Drimeld salon. Rosie was the chief attraction. Kindhearted, affectionate, she became Ashenden's mistress, but he knew he shared her with others. One day she ran off to the U. S. with a married...