The Adventures of Tartu (1943)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

As clearly demonstrated by this film, prior to the Normandy invasion, the Allies were convinced that the Germans were manufacturing weaponized gas to use during the Second World War, just as they did during the the First World War. This assumption spawned this very typical propaganda film in which all of the Germans in occupied Czechoslovakia wear black SS uniforms with the skull and crossbones insignia of the Totenkopf Verband (the "Death's Head" Brigade was the SS unit that administered the concentration camp system) on their caps and greet each other and civilians with the Hitler salute. It's a melodramatic and very simplistic film where everything is reduced in complexity due to the näiveté of the filmmakers and the film audiences of the period. For this reason, instead of a team of well-trained saboteurs going in to execute the mission, a single tri-lingual army captain (Robert Donat) is parachuted in and has to make contact with "the Underground" in order to carry out what would be a huge, complicated mission in real life. Fortunately for our hero, the German tools in this film aren't the brightest ones in the Third Reich's shed and "the Underground" is easily convinced of his authenticity. It also doesn't hurt that one of the Underground's important members (Valerie Hobson) falls in love with him after spending an hour in his company. I should have given it three or four stars, for the lack of realism, but it is typical of the time period, so I gave it five.

Robert Donat is one of my favorite actors of the 1930s to 1950s. Despite a relatively small film output (roughly 25 movies I believe) Donat showed a wide variety of different parts, including comedy, historical, character studies, spy films (including THE 39 STEPS for Hitchcock), and straight drama. He never gave a bad performance even if the film left some problems. And all was accomplished despite being a serious asthmatic. To top it off, he pulled off the all time miracle "Oscar" for best actor. He beat Clarke Gable in 1939, when Gable's "Rhett Butler" was the odds favorite for best role. Donat trumped it with the schoolmaster, "Mr. Chipping", in GOODBYE MR. CHIPS. Fans of GONE WITH THE WIND may have cause to grumble (forgetting Gable already won the Oscar as "Peter Warne" in IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT) but fans of Donat (and they included Walter Matthau, who said he was his favorite actor) have never complained.SABOTAGE AGENT is known in the U.S. as THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU. The title change is understandable. There are so many films with "sabotage" in the title (Hitchcock had "SABOTAGE" in 1936 and "SABOTEUR" in 1943). But the name is misleading accidentally. "Jan Tartu" is the false identity name given to Donat's character Captain Terence Stevenson when he is sent on a mission into Czechoslovakia during World War II. The ADVENTURES OF STEVENSON would have been less misleading on this point, but people might have thought that it referred to the author of TREASURE ISLAND.Stevenson, a linguist, has been on home watch duty, but is selected for the mission due to his grasp on central European languages, specifically, Czech, Roumanian, and German (a neat trick, by the way, as these are from three separate language groups: Slavic, Latin, and Germanic - Stevenson must have been like my father, a real super expert on foreign tongues). The real Tartu (who has conveniently been killed) was a member of Roumania's native Fascist group, "The Iron Guard". The Roumanians joined the Axis in 1941, having seen what happened to the most pro-Western Balkan state (Yugoslavia) which was invaded and bombed (as was Greece). Roumania and Bulgaria (the latter reluctantly) joined the Nazis (Roumania did it willingly in expectation of expanding its borders, Bulgaria to protect itself from the Russians under Stalin). It's instructive to follow what happened in both countries. From the King on down in Bulgaria there was a general refusal to cooperate in sending Jews to their deaths in German camps, so that 90% of Bulgaria's Jews (the largest number of ANY country in Europe) survived World War II. Roumania handed the bulk of them over.Donat goes to Prague as Tartu, and plays him as a flamboyant nitwit. The Nazis have little real use for him in Prague (he is there on some trivial diplomatic excuse) and find him more of a nuisance than anything else. Donat decides to allow the Nazis to find just useless he is - in one sequence he manages to insist on "helping" them capture an anti-Nazi partisan. Of course the partisan escapes while the Nazis are forced to see "Tartu" pounding on a wall as though he is doing something remarkably clever.The mission is to find the secret factory where a deadly new gas is being manufactured (this is a running theme in many films of the 1930s and 1940s - a secret poison gas that some country is manufacturing to use on the battlefield: memories of the battles of World War I prevented people from considering poison gas used on civilian prisoners for "ethnic cleansing" purposes). With the assistance of Glynis Johns and Valerie Hobson Donat does find the factory, cleverly hidden within a mountain. Now the problem is to destroy it, which leads to an exciting conclusion within the factory within the mountain.Unusual for most Donat films (only KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR has as much daring-do involving Donat and co-star Marlene Dietrich fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1919) THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU is a good escapist film. Although the references in it put it firmly in 1943 when it was made it is still an entertaining film for today. The performances are good, with Johns quite moving as she sacrifices herself for Donat's mission, and Hobson being forced to descend to murder to help as well. I recommend it for those performances, as well as Donat's over-the-top one as the eccentric "Iron Guardist".

On a Nazi twin bill, I watched this film, also known as The Adventures of Tartu, or simply Tartu. It was a much more involved thriller with Robert Donat as a British Officer who goes to Romania to hopefully destroy the latest in Nazi poison gas. Unlike Saddam Hussein, the Nazis really did have WMDs and the release of a gas like this could have turned the war.Donat is best remembered for his Academy Award winning performance in Goodbye Mr. Chips. he was likened to Clark Gable, so it was interesting that his win came at Gable's expense in Gone With the Wind. He is also remembered for Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.Donat was magnificent in the film as a Romanian dandy. He was totally believable and his constant Heil Hitler reminded me so much of Roberto Benini's performance in Life is Beautiful. Maybe Benini modeled his performance on Donat's.We also see an early Glynis Johns, who got an Oscar nomination for The Sundowners, and a Golden Globe nomination for The Chapman Report. Many may remember her as Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins.The aristocratic Valerie Hobson played the love interest. She is best known for being married to John Profumo, who brought down the British Government in the Christine Keeler Affair. She was a "stand by your man" wife and gave up acting to work with the developmentally disabled.She gave an excellent performance as someone who openly flirted with the Nazi's, but was actually a member of the underground.

This propaganda film pits a British-born, German-educated, chemical engineer (Stevnson - Robert Donat) who speaks Rumanian, German and Russian fluently against Nazis in Eastern Europe. Captain Stevenson becomes an Iron Guard named Tartu (the real Tartu is dead) and heads off, with minimal briefing and no espionage experience, to upset a Nazi plot. Stevenson seeks to infiltrate a German chemical weapons plant but needs help from the local resistance to succeed. But how, posing as a Nazi, can he get the underground to trust him? Although the basic premise is a tad ludicrous, the film is very carefully plotted and the characters are likable, well-written and well played. Donat, Glynnis Johns and Valerie Hobson are especially good. The cinematography, directing and editing are very standard for early-mid-20th century British film - very straightforward and focused on the story - little to no experimentation and very few pans. But the pace of the film complements - or at least compensates for - the theatrical camera work fairly well.Recommended for Donat fans and those interested in WWII-era war films.