Traitor Spy

If transposing Marie Stopes' Married Love to the screen didn't win undying fame for Summers, this - his last picture for an ungrateful world - surely should have done. Cabot plays a British armaments worker and freelance spy who is forced to go on the run after killing (and dismembering) a disgruntled German agent who makes an attempt on his life. As the film moves from toy-town Devon to a very seedy London, it rapidly takes off from the cardboard conventions of the British thriller. In its creation of authentic atmosphere - an Italian dentist/tattooist's parlour in the Waterloo Road, a sleazy night-club populated by spivs, whores and multi-national gangsters - the film offers a fascinating glimpse into the underworld of the '30s, and presages the realism of the following decade. Summers skilfully exploits the paranoia of the phony war to create satisfyingly red-blooded villains, and the melodramatic conflagration of an ending is remarkably, and effectively, uncompromising.