Careful, Soft Shoulder

Sole directorial credit rung up by screenwriter Garrett (City Streets, Duel in the Sun, Dead Reckoning), this is only a B movie, but one which brings freshness and a touch of reality to tired genre conventions. Set in Washington, it's about a bored socialite, paid a retainer to hang around political and social circles displaying the latest fashions, who gets more than she bargained for when a conversational gambit that she wouldn't mind being a spy is taken seriously by a Nazi (played by the portly Mather in the blandly avuncular Greenstreet manner). Most of it is wise-crackingly light-hearted, gradually shading into Hitchcock territory with a climactic fight in a deserted mill. But the point is that the story is casually told in flashback by the heroine, still offhand and joking about the whole thing, and thereby underlining Garrett's charge of dilettantism about the war (even after Pearl Harbor) aimed against the Washington upper crust at all levels.