22: Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Hitchcock’s films early American films were very often explicitly about the war in Europe, the overt purpose being to engage American sentiment as Britain was getting bombarded. FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, his first film for Hollywood, is the definitive example. Though not his most political film about the war (that would be 1944’s LIFEBOAT, which effectively starts on a shipwreck much like the one that ends this film), it is a direct call to arms through the lens of a free-wheeling American journalist who is sobered by what he sees. His character, played ably by Joel McCrea, is very similar to Mel Gibson in Peter Weir’s THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, in which he plays an equally rambunctious Australian journalist dropped into a brewing revolution in Indonesia. Both men are as taken in by romance as the politics, and both are forced to to see the world in a bee and complex way because of their experience.