Mission à Tanger (1949)
Directed by André Hunebelle

Film Review

Mission à Tanger was in the vanguard of a spate of spy thrillers that enjoyed considerable popularity in France from the late 1940s, well into the 1960s, anticipating the global success of the British James Bond movies.  The template for these films had been set by their American counterpart, made in Hollywood immediately after WWII, and not surprisingly many of these were set at the time of the war.  OSS 117, the most famous spy in French fiction, made his first film appearance in OSS 117 n'est pas mort (1957), and he is not too far removed from the ambiguous, womanising hero of Mission à Tanger, played by a smooth but devious Raymond Rouleau in his most famous role.  Rouleau's debonair Georges Masse was a hit with the public and would appear in two subsequent films - Méfiez-vous des blondes (1950) and Massacre en dentelles (1952).

Mission à Tanger is a slow burner, most of the first half of the film taking place in a swanky nightclub (an easy excuse for several musical numbers) inhabited by a motley collection that includes none other than Louis de Funès, then a complete unknown (it would be a decade and a half before stardom came knocking on his dressing room door).  The action doesn't get underway until well into the second half of the film, and even then it's pretty routine stuff, directed with no particular flair for the genre by journeyman director André Hunebelle.  The payoff comes right at the end of the film, with a tense and atmospherically shot shoot-out scene on a moonlit beach.  The film's main claim to fame is that it was the first to which Michel Audiard, at the time a 29-year-old journalist, lent his talents as a scriptwriter.  There's precious little sign of the familiar Audiard wit in the mostly humourless script he turns in, but it was the first step in a monumental career that would see Audiard pen some of French cinema's best loved and most successful films.  Hunebelle would later work with de Funès on some of his most popular films, including the Fantômas comedies of the mid-1960s.  Although overshadowed by subsequent spy thrillers, Mission à Tanger is worth re-discovering if only to gain an appreciation of its part in shaping an important genre of French cinema.

Film Synopsis

In 1942, the Moroccan city of Tangier is a hotbed of international espionage.  It is here that Alexandre Segard runs a spy ring, under the cover of an import-export company.  After several of his agents have been eliminated, Segard recruits journalist Georges Masse to uncover the identity of the traitor in his organisation.  No sooner has Masse agreed to work for Segard than he is captured by a high-ranking Nazi agent, von Kloster.  The latter offers to give him a large sum of money and release a woman he has kidnapped if Masse agrees to hand over a secret code used by Segard....