Word: ashendene
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British Novelist William Somerset Maugham is a great believer in firsthand adventure as a source for fiction. He turned his own experiences as World War I intelligence agent into the spy novel Ashenden. Last week the aging, 66-year-old author had abundant material for a World War II novel accumulated during a 20-day voyage of escape from France in the company of 1,300 British refugees...
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...
...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...