Secret People

There were such hopes invested in this film, Lindsay Anderson wrote a book about its production, but it has never really recovered from its commercial and seemingly artistic failure. In truth, for a film that aspires to be an intelligent study of anarchists beliefs, it suffers from a timidity that some may find all too typical of the British films of its period, and from punches pulled in a manner that rather typifies the work of that almost brilliant director, Thorold Dickinson. But it is an intelligent study for all that, gripping and persuasive until one too many plot convolutions spoils it. I have never failed to be moved when seeing it, nor to be frustrated that it wasn't just a little bit better. The story revolves around European refugees in London who get caught up in the activities of anarchists. Valentina Cortese gives a haunting performance as the conscience-stricken refugee caught up in an assassination plot, and a young Audrey Hepburn is her ballet-dancing innocent sister whose life she must save.