"Secret People" is largely remembered for providing Audrey Hepburn with what has been described as "her first significant film role", although in fact her character Nora does not play a major part in the plot until the very end of the film. (The film is much more about her older sister Maria). Audrey seems to have been cast mainly on the basis of her dancing skills (she had trained at ballet school) because Nora is an aspiring ballerina and several dance sequences, with little connection to the main storyline, are featured. Her acting skills, however, must have impressed the director Thorold Dickinson because it was on the basis of a screen test he made with Audrey that she won the leading role in "Roman Holiday", her big Hollywood breakthrough.
Nora and Maria arrive in London as political refugees after a dictator seizes power in their unnamed European homeland. Seven years later, Maria is reunited with her lover Louis who she learns is a member of a revolutionary organisation plotting to overthrow the country's government. Louis recruits Maria into the group and persuades her, much against her will, to take part in a plan to assassinate the dictator when he visits London. This places Maria in a dilemma. She has every reason to hate the regime, which was responsible for the death of her father, but also recalls that her father was a pacifist who would have disapproved of violence in any circumstances. Maria's dilemma becomes all the greater when the assassination plot goes wrong and the dictator survives but an innocent woman is killed instead. (The title "Secret People", incidentally, does not derive from any association with "secret agents" but from the idea that we all have a "secret person" hidden inside us, a "person" which becomes visible when we are under stress).
The film's political stance is a potentially interesting one. Although it was made only a few years after the end of World War II, the treatment of Louis and his group is by no means as positive as one might expect. They are not shown as the moral equivalent of the European Resistance movements during the war itself, who were nearly always portrayed in a positive, even heroic, light. Dickinson seems to have wanted to imply that revolutionary movements can take on, if only subconsciously, something of the moral character of the governments they oppose, because Louis and his followers are fanatical, authoritarian and callous of human life, whether that be the life of innocent bystanders caught up in their schemes or the life of their own members whose loyalty is considered suspect. Any crime can be justified provided it furthers their cause. The film quotes W H Auden's well-known line that "We must love one another or die", but the attitude of Louis and his associates can be summed up in another Auden line- "The acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder".
This is a potentially interesting theme, but it is not dealt with in a very interesting way. The character of Louis needed to be more developed in order to show how the once-idealistic young man whom Maria remembers has become a violent political fanatic and we could have learned more about the other members of the revolutionary cell. Instead, all the emphasis is on Maria, and matters are not helped by the fact that Valentina Cortese, here billed as "Cortesa", gives a rather dull performance, making Maria seem too cautious and indecisive ever to be plausible as an active accomplice to a political murder. When "Secret People" came out in 1952, the film critic of "The Times" described it as "a confused, inarticulate, disappointing film, neither as imaginative nor as intellectually exciting as it should be," and there is justice in that criticism. It is little-known today- I recently caught a rare television screening- and unlikely to appeal to many people except to Audrey Hepburn completists. 5/10
A goof. The line "We must love one another or die" is quoted in the context of a scene set in 1930, but in fact it is taken from Auden's poem "September 1st 1939" which as its title might suggest was not written until 1939.
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