"Contraband" (1940) is an uneven WWII spy yarn: occasionally effective, but often slack when it should have been tight. It wants to play in the Alfred Hitchcock ballpark (it may remind you of his 1942 film "Saboteur"), but never quite makes it in the same league, although there are some purely Hitchcockian moments, like when Conrad Veidt is searching through London nightclubs for a male singer he has just heard, only to eventually realize it was a woman with a deep voice! Finely acted by the two leads, Veidt and the beautiful Valerie Hobson, but that Danish chef overacts terribly. **1/2 out of 4.
Review of Blackout
