Star Review
Hitchcock made Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache in a month in wartime, to celebrate the French resistance; the French never showed them.
In the former, a French actor in London tells of the crooked police chief he knew in Madagascar who worked with the Vichy government, while the actor busies himself smuggling men abroad to fight with the allies, until he's betrayed. En route to a penal colony, he's rescued by the British, and broadcasts to Madagascar to encourage further resistance. It's clearly made on a shoestring - in one scene a blank wall and a porthole represent the interior of a ship (rather strikingly) - but the tone is odd, the tale intercut (and undercut) by scenes of the actors making up. The French seem to have muttered 'don't mention the collaboration' and put it on the shelf.
Bon Voyage, in which an airman recounts his escape from Germany, is tarter and more Hitchcockian, full of night and shadows and betrayal. When he finds after telling his story [spoiler alert] that a fellow escapee was a spy, we reconsider the whole story and see that what appeared to be a great escape was in fact a series of traps. The French didn't think much of this as a flagwaver either.
Britain was also uninterested in hearing of French heroism, so the films stayed largely unseen until rediscovery 50 years later. They're entertaining, even if they don't add much to what we know of the director; but films like Foreign Correspondent and Lifeboat, made in Hollywood, were far more significant.
John Westbrooke on 12th November 2008
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Film Description
A compilation of two wartime shorts Hitchcock made for the Ministry of Information: Bon Voyage, in which a young Scottish RAF pilot is debriefed by French officials about his escape from occupied territory, and Aventure Malgache, in which an actor tells of his time in the Resistance.
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