Yorkshire Post (15/Oct/1935) - Ashenden at Work

Details

• article: Ashenden at Work
• newspaper: Yorkshire Post (15/Oct/1935)
• keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Gaumont British Picture Corporation Limited, John Gielgud, Madeleine Carroll, Peter Lorre, Robert Young, Secret Agent (1936), The 39 Steps (1935), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), W. Somerset Maugham

Article

Ashenden at Work

An imposing cast, has been assembled by Gaumont for "The Secret Agent," the next film to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The plot will be based on Somerset Maugham's "Ashenden" stories about secret service work in Switzerland during the War, and the part of Ashenden will be taken by John Gielgud, who has not been seen on the screen since his success as Inigo Jollifant in "The Good Companions."

Miss Madeleine Carroll — who after "I Was a Spy" and "The Thirty-Nine Steps," must be thoroughly accustomed to international intrigue — will be the heroine, and Peter Lorre, who made his name with English audiences in "The Man Who Knew Too Much," will appear as the "hairless Mexican," Ashenden's unreliable gunman. Finally, Robert Young, one of the most intelligent of Hollywood's younger actors, is coming over to play the villain.

Mr. Hitchcock is now in Geneva surveying locations, and will afterwards go to Nisch, in Bulgaria, for the same purpose. The prodigious success of "The Thirty-Nine Steps" on both sides of the Atlantic has brought him back, after a lean period, to the front rank of British directors, and "The Secret Agent" should give him an excellent opportunity to display his mastery of "thriller" technique on a generous scale.