Most people never have heard of Bruce Lockhart. He was (with Sidney Reilly) one of the two best British Agents in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Reilly (whose life was the basis of a BBC series about twenty years ago called REILLY: ACE OF SPIES) died in Russia - either having been executed or (more likely) willing to become an agent of the Soviet Secret Police. Lockhart stayed in Russia until the early 1920s, when (in a remarkable series of close calls) he escaped through Central Asia into India and returned home. His memoirs were eventually published.
Lockhart's career is the basis of James Hilton's character A. J. Fothergill / Peter Ouragoff (Robert Donat) in the novel KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR. Not totally, of course. Lockhart did not end his life with an ex-Russian countess as his wife (Marlene Dietrich here, as Countess Alexandra Vladinoff). But the general tone of Lockhart's career in Russia is there. Also the support Lockhart (and most western governments) tended to give the White Russians who were anti-Bolshevik.
The story is Hilton's Russian Revolution novel. As such it tends to the anti - Bolshevik line that the West took, with Dietrich one of the persecuted ex-aristocrats who are in danger of being shot by the new rulers of Russia. To the credit of the screenplay some of the White Russian brutality is shown, but the edge of the story looks at the Bolsheviks as evil incarnate, except for John Clements who finds that rescuing Dietrich at one point is just too much for his own twisted standards.
The film is a good one, but somehow the action is too jumpy - in particular the initial stages of the story which goes from 1910 to 1917 to quickly. We know that Dietrich is widowed by the war, but we never learn what happened to her husband (presumably killed in battle). Some of the later events are speed-ed up, and the conclusion we assume is happy, as Donat jumps out of the temporary restraints on his own person, and apparently jumps successfully onto Dietrich's train to be reunited with her.
But the best moment of the film is shared with another actor - Hay Petrie as a station master. It was the scene that stood out above all others to Graham Greene, at that time a movie critic for a London newspaper. Greene enjoyed this weird scene where Donat and Dietrich are fleeing and find railway tracks and a little, undisturbed station. They enter and go to the ticket office, but can't find anyone. Then Petrie turns up and says that they'll have to purchase their tickets on the next train. He tells them it will be there in fifteen minutes. They sit down and hope the train will take them away from their Bolshevik pursuers. They converse about their situation and plans. Then Petrie returns and tells them to get ready - the train is coming. They go out on the platform and don't see any sign of any train in either direction. Petrie comes out waiving a broken lantern and announcing the arrival of the next train, and the horrified couple realize they've been dealing with a madman. Greene was right: it was the moment of the film that remains most firmly in one's memory.
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