Adapted from a play by Campbell Dixon, based on two stories in the 1927 collection Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham, this adaptation introduces Edgar Brodie (John Gielgud) returning from the war, only to discover he’s been reported dead. The story then follows his transformation into Richard Ashenden, with help from characters like ‘the hairless Mexican’ and ‘the general,’ whose identities are misleading. Elsa Carrington (Madeleine Carroll), who took the assignment for excitement, is also introduced as his wife for cover.

While the Mexican has no issues with killing anyone in his way, both Edgar/Richard and Elsa have problems doing so. She’s already fallen in love with our hero as well and soon learns that Robert Marvin (Robert Young), the man who has been hitting on her from the start, is really the enemy agent everyone is after. And the killer in the middle of all of this, the General (Peter Lorre), seems like he could murder anyone at any time. Also, if he feels twitchy, he was kicking drugs at the time that this was made.

Gielgud wasn’t happy that his character was an enigma, and director Alfred Hitchcock later said that, since he didn’t seem heroic, it was hard to be on his side.

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Released in the U.S. as The Woman Alone, this Alfred Hitchcock film starts with movie theater owner Karl Verloc (Oskar Homolka) shutting down the power in London before working with a group of terrorists to leave bombs all over the city. Detective Sergeant Ted Spencer (John Loder) is working undercover to catch him, posing as a grocery store owner while starting to fall for the man’s wife, played by Sylvia Sidney.

The machinations of the terrorists lead to her brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) being killed, and a depressed Verloc literally walks into a knife that his wife is holding, ending his life. Spencer tries to keep her from confessing to the murder, and when the final bomb explodes, destroying Verloc’s body, she is able to get away with it. 

This was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a story about a woman who learns that her husband is a terrorist. As Hitchcock had already made another movie called Secret Agent. When this was remade in 1959 for the Canadian TV series Startime, Homolka reprised the same role.

When the bus driver remarks in Inglorious Basterds that  “You can’t bring that on here. It’s flammable,” it comes from this.

In one of his interviews with François Truffaut, Hitchcock claimed he was wrong to shoot the scene where Stevie dies, because the character received too much sympathy and “the public was resentful”. Truffaut commented that having a child die in a movie is a “ticklish matter” and an “an abuse of cinematic power.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

This Universal movie serial — told in twelve parts — shares some similarities with the earlier serial The Vanishing Shadow, including the inventions of an invisibility belt and a remote-control robot.

That makes sense — at the time, Universal was all about recycling. This movie contains stock footage from The Invisible Ray and The Vanishing Shadow, as well as music from the Flash Gordon serials and Frankenstein movies, plus car chase footage that had been used in several other serials and newsreel footage taken from the Hindenburg disaster.

Eight years after his star turn in Dracula, Bela Lugosi’s career was in decline. He had been typecast as a horror star and was not seen as talented as his co-star — and possible rival — Boris Karloff.

This career downturn had many factors behind it. Universal changed management in 1936, and due to a British ban on horror films, they dropped the once-popular films from their production schedule. Lugosi found himself consigned to Universal’s non-horror B-film unit, the same team that made serials like this. And while the actor was busy with stage work, he had to borrow money from the Actors Fund to pay the hospital bills for the birth of his son, Bela George Lugosi, in 1938.

However, that year brought Bela back. California theater owner Emil Umann revived Dracula and Frankenstein as a special double feature, a bill so successful that it played to sellout crowds and Lugosi himself came to host the movies. The actor would say, “I was dead, and he brought me back to life.” Universal took notice of the tremendous business and launched its own national re-release, as well as hiring Lugosi to star in new films.

The Phantom Creeps — yes, we’ll get back to this movie in a minute — was the last of the five serials that the actor would make, shot right after he returned from making Dead Eyes of London. It was released a week before his comeback vehicle, Son of Frankenstein.

Sadly, by 1948, the parts dwindled again and severe sciatica from Lugosi’s military service was treated with opiates, causing a downward spiral that the actor would never really emerge from. He appeared in movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster. After making that movie, he checked himself into rehab, one of the first celebrities to publicly do so. According to Kitty Kelley’s His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, “Old Blue Eyes” helped with expenses, despite never meeting Lugosi before and visited him at the hospital.

The actor died of a heart attack in 1956, having just married his fifth wife. And yes, he was buried in his Dracula cape.

In this film, he plays Dr. Zorka, a man who loves to make weapons and refuses to sell them to anyone or any country. This upsets all manner of people, like Dr. Fred Mallory, his former partner, and government man Captain Bob West.

Dorothy Arnold, who plays love interest Jean Drew, was the first wife of baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Look for Edward Van Sloan, who always played the doctor battling the supernatural in Universal films. He’s Van Helsing in Dracula, Dr. Muller in The Mummy and Dr. Waldman in Frankenstein. In fact, that movie begins by him warning the audience that they can leave now if they’re too frightened. And Ed Wolff, the seven-foot-four-inch actor who played the robot, was also in Invaders from Mars and The Return of the Fly.

Speaking of the robot, you may have seen him in Rob Zombie’s work. The song “Meet the Creeper” is based on the movie and the robot often appears in the singer’s music videos and stage shows.

You can download this from The Internet Archive.

Starting with Todd Slaughter at the BBC, talking about his first two movies (Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), this has him playing Stephen Hawke, a money lender who loves his daughter Julia (Marjorie Taylor). He’s also the Spine-Breaker, a serial killer who is the opposite of his friendly self.

He ends up murdering Joshua Trimble (D J Williams), the father of his daughter’s fiancee Matthew (Eric Portman). Miles Archer (Gerald Barry), another suitor, finds out and tries to blackmail Julia into marrying him instead, so Hawke kills him, but falls off a roof to his death.

It’s a stage play, like Slaughter’s other films, but he’s so strong in this that he can snap a man with his bare hands. Director George King and Slaughter teamed for several of these films, which were encouraged by the British government so that not every movie was made in Hollywood that screened in the UK.

You can watch this on Tubi.