Secret People

Valentina Cortesa - Maria Brentano
Serge Reggiani - Louis
Audrey Hepburn - Nora
Angela Fouldes - Nora as a child
Charles Goldner - Anselmo
Megs Jenkins - Penny
Irene Worth - Miss Jackson
Reginald Tate - Insp. Kellick
Geoffrey Hibbert - Steenie
Sydney Tafler - Syd Burnett
John Ruddock - Daly

Secret People is concerned with a political theme. The making of Thorold Dickinson's penultimate, and last British, film was followed closely by Lindsay Anderson, who had been a co-founder of the Oxford film magazine Sequence, and who later became a film and stage director of considerable eminence. It was unfortunate that the film selected for this treatment should have been directed by someone from outside the main stream of Ealing directors.

The story of Secret People had been conceived by Dickinson some years earlier in conjunction with the novelist Joyce Carey, who had been responsible for the screenplay of Dickinson's 1946 picture, Men of Two Worlds. For various reasons production of Secret People had been put off until finally Balcon, recognising it as a change from the usual Ealing product, invited Dickinson to film it under his aegis. The plot is reminiscent of Conrad's The Secret Agent, being concerned with a bomb plot in 1930s London planned by nationals of a foreign tyranny who implicate members of the refugee community. Adopted by a kindly Italian restaurateur (Charles Goldner), Maria and Nora gradually overcome the loss of their father and get on with their lives. But when an old family friend enters the picture, the girls are plunged into a maelstrom of international intrigue. The upshot of this is a misguided murder charge and an eleventh-hour act of selfless sacrifice. Dickinson and his colleagues viewed Hitchcock's Sabotage, which was based on the Conrad book, before starting their film.

There is much of interest in the Ealing film - the moral dilemma of those who have to resort to force to overcome force, for instance, though there is no question of the evil of the dictatorship, which is maintained by murder, oppression and torture by secret police. It is also a love story, with a sensitive performance by the Italian actress, Valentina Cortesa, who had been brought over from Hollywood where she had been wasted in a number of unsuitable roles. Secret People also gave Audrey Hepburn a substantial role nearly two years before Roman Holiday, which most reference books regard as the start of her film stardom. But the film was poorly received and was misinterpreted in some quarters as an attack on the left. It has never been easy to make a political film in Britain, and few have ever been attempted. Secret People was in some respects ahead of its time.
Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.