Another UK made, WWII, British secret agent dons a Nazi uniform and romances a beautiful girl film. Known in the UK as The Adventures of Tartu, but released in the US under the more banal title Sabotage Agent, the film stars then recent Oscar winner Robert Donat as British Captain Terence Stevenson, a chemical engineer who do to his expertise in his field, his fluent German, and having grown up partially in Romania, is recruited by his government for a special assignment. Stevenson is to assume the identity of a Romanian chemist and fascist Captain Jan Tartu, recently secretly murdered by the Romanian resistance, and con his way into Czechoslovakia's famous Skoda Works plant to sabotage a particularly deadly new poison gas the Nazi's are developing there. Donat gets to have extra fun in the film not only because he gets to romance the beautiful Valerie Hobson (who looks a lot like 'Toyota Jan') but because he gets to play in essence two characters, the noble Stevenson, and his cover persona as the flamboyant playboy Tartu.
This movie works well, Donat's performance is obviously the best thing it has going for it but there are more twists and turns here then I'd expected, multiple cases of mistaken identity, and Glynis Johns in full sympathetic mode gets to make a noble sacrifice for the cause of freedom. Somehow the ridicules coincidence laden script succumbs to the cast and crews efforts to earnestly plow thorough it, the results strain credulity but are still plenty entertaining. Before writing this review I did a little Google searching on the Romanian experience in the second World War, and that's about as crazy as this movie, I recommend checking both the film and the history out. ***
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