RENDEZVOUS

 

RENDEZVOUS is a 1935 World War One spy story from MGM, with (unfortunately) a lot of light comedic elements. 

The film is set in 1917, and former newspaperman Bill Gordon (William Powell) is itching to get to the front. American intelligence agencies, however, want Bill to work for them stateside, since he's written a book on cryptography. Gordon reluctantly takes up their offer, and he starts to investigate a German espionage ring. Bill's biggest challenge isn't foreign agents--it is the trying affections of Joel Carter (Rosalind Russell), a flighty young woman who happens to be the niece of the Assistant Secretary of War. 

There's a good spy tale inside of RENDEZVOUS, but it's overwhelmed by the screwball-like antics of Rosalind Russell's Joel Carter. The character is supposed to be a comic annoyance, but she's such an intrusion on the plot the viewer starts to wince whenever she shows up. In fairness to Russell, the role isn't written very well, and the actress wasn't even supposed to be in the movie originally--Myrna Loy was picked to play the part, but she didn't due to issues she had with MGM at the time. Russell was at the beginning of her movie career, and she was understandably nervous about replacing Loy and co-starring with Powell. If Loy did do the role, I think she would have done it in a more subtle manner. In all honesty, the story would have worked much better if the character of Joel Carter wasn't even in it--but there was no way MGM was going to star William Powell in a movie and not give him a romantic interest. 

Speaking of Powell, he's always entertaining to watch, and he tries to strike a balance to his role, with Bill Gordon seriously taking his job and wanting to get to the front lines, while at the same time still being smooth and urbane (and still winding up wearing a tuxedo at a few points.) Gordon's frustration at not being "Over There" is a major plot element, but in real life it would be a waste to have a man with such capabilities wind up being cannon fodder. 

Being that this is an MGM production, it has the expected high class gloss, and a fine supporting cast. Binnie Barnes plays a Mata Hari type who becomes a romantic rival to Rosalind Russell. Barnes' character's name is Olivia Karloff--yes, you read that right (I wonder what Boris thought of that?). Lionel Atwill is a British intelligence officer who is having an affair with Barnes. Atwill is still able to make a distinctive mark despite the fact that he's only in the first half of the film (his character comes to a surprising fate). Ironically the year before Atwill appeared in another MGM WWI spy drama, playing the same type of role, called STAMBOUL QUEST, which starred.....Myrna Loy. (That might have been a main reason why Loy didn't want to be in RENDEZVOUS--in STAMBOUL QUEST, Loy was the lead, while in this film she would have been comic relief.) The rest of the cast has such familiar faces as Cesar Romero, Henry Stephenson, Charles Trowbridge, and Samuel S. Hinds. There's also "blink and you'll miss them" cameos by Margaret Dumont and Mickey Rooney. 

RENDEZVOUS was directed by William K. Howard and the cinematographer was William Daniels, but while researching info about this movie on the internet, I learned that the ending of it was re-shot with director Sam Wood and cinematographer James Wong Howe, the duo that worked on.....STAMBOUL QUEST. I don't know what the original ending was, but I assume it was changed to make William Powell's character more heroic. 

Something else I learned about the production of this film....while watching it I noticed that a couple of times William Powell's lines are dubbed by what was obviously another person. I couldn't understand why, I just assumed that there wasn't enough time to do it properly, but I discovered that MGM was attempting to edit out the mention of the words "German" or "Germany", because supposedly the studio didn't want to offend the current regime! If that's true, that's very disappointing--and it also doesn't make much sense, since from what I can remember other characters in the film do mention Germany, and spies are shown in the story speaking German, and anyone who watched this film in 1935 had to have known that Germany was the main antagonist in World War One. 

The main attributes of RENDEZVOUS are William Powell and Lionel Atwill, but the silly antics of Rosalind Russell's character prevents it from being above average.