kenjha A feisty young Irish woman brought up to hate the English plans to join the IRA to put her hatred into action. It veers unevenly between comedy and thriller. The comedy is not funny and the thrills are nothing to write home about. However, the biggest problem is that the script lacks a narrative flow. It seems that the story is being made up as it goes along, rambling on without rhyme or reason. This film and "Black Narcissus" helped Kerr become a star, paving her way to a Hollywood career. She's fine, but Howard is somewhat bland as a British agent. Launder, who started as a writer and wrote "The Lady Vanishes," seems less comfortable in the director's chair here.

BILLYBOY-10 Bridie O'Debrah Kerr is a feisty, hot blooded, tempestuous, Irish lass who leaves her small village at 21 to go to the big city to join the IRA. She gets rebuffed and pours paint over a statue of Oliver Cromwell because she is feisty and hot-blooded. Soon she falls in with Nazi spies and joins them in helping another spy escape by waylaying Trevor Howard who is a British military officer and of course he is nuts about her. The spy escapes but now she must complete a mission to get the top secret plans the Nazi's want. But first she has to push one of her conspirators off a cliff from a wheelchair into the sea below (he's dead anyway). She manages to get the secrets notebook but realizes it may cost the lives of English and Irishmen, so she burns it.Now some more Nazi's appear and kidnap her and Trevor who has followed her and they proceed in a carriage behind a funeral procession of carriages with a coffin filled with whiskey and alarm clocks (honest). They escape and then she decides to turn herself in but now it's D-Day and she doesn't have to so they get married but on her wedding night she bolts from the hotel with her suitcase and runs away because the name of the Inn is The Cromwell Arms and since she hates him she won't stay there (honest).The movies vacillates between pretty good espionage and yucks so it sort of misses the mark. I could see Maureen O'Hara playing this part but Kerr got it instead.The most exciting thing for me was seeing Joan Hickson in a minor role as a hotel proprietress some 40 plus years before she came to fame as Miss Marple on the Agatha Christie Mystery series on PBS.This film is OK, I watched it in the late afternoon when it was absolutely pouring outside and there was nothing else to do,it's good for that, and that's about all: A lousy day time killer.

sol (Some Spoilers) Somewhat light comedy about a very very serious subject, espionage in wartime. The film "I See a Dark Stranger" has to do with a young Irish woman Bridie Quilty, Deborah Kerr, who get's involved with a bunch of German spies. This all happens on the eve of the cross-channel invasion of Hitler's Europe:D-Day.Bridie travels to Dublin from her home in Ballygarry to see her hero former Irish freedom fighter, and now curator and administrator of the Irish Easter Rebellion Museum, Michael O'Callaghn played by Brenfi O'Rorke. Shocked at O'Callaghn's benign attitude towards the hated British Bridie is soon spotted by German spy, whom she met on the train, Mr. Miller, Raymond Huntley.With her violent dislike of the British Empire in what it did and is still doing, in occupying Northern Ireland, to her beloved land of Eire Bridie falls right in with Miller and his fellow German spies. Traveling with Miller to the English village of Wynbridge Bridie gets a job as a domestic in an effort to help Miller get a fellow German spy Oscar Pryce, David Ward, freed from British military detention.At Wynbridge Bridie meets British officer Let. David Baynes, Trevor Howard,who for some strange reason, Bridie is anything but friendly with the hated British soldier, falls in love with her. The rest of the movie has Bridie in trying to stick it to the British Empire, by helping it's mortal enemy Germany win the war, slowly realize what she's doing and how it may well have her end up facing a British firing squad!Traveling to the Isle of Man Bridie recovers, hidden in the Isle's Parliament Building, a booklet that the now deceased German spy Miller, who was earlier killed by the British Tommies, ordered her to. The booklet is to later be returned to the German Ambassador to Irland in Dublin who will transmit it's secret coded message back to Berlin. Its then that the naive Bridie is shocked to find out that the booklet's secret code reveals the time and place of the allied invasion of Europe! Knowing that the lives of thousands of allied soldiers, including many of Irish ancestry, are at stake if the Germans get a hold of it Bridie, in a sudden change of heart, burns the booklet in her hotel rooms fireplace. The movie then changes from a spy thriller to a 1930's like screwball comedy with the bumbling and totally ineffective German spies providing most of the laughs!Well paced and very entertaining thriller/comedy with both Deborah Kerr and Trevor Howard, as Bridie and David, caught up with circumstances beyond their control. David who's in love with Bridie is now forced to turn her over, after she confessed to him, to the British Military Authorities as a spy that would mean curtain death for her.As much as the movies extremely contrived ending is it still doesn't spoil what happened when your suddenly and out of the blue, together with a clock smuggling funeral possession, hit by it. David facing a dilemma in turning Bridie over to the police tries to smooth things out by turning her over to the police, or so he thought, being from the nation of Free Irland. It's when David suddenly realizes were he's at, the British controlled north of the country, that things really start to go wacko.More of a romantic comedy then anything else "I See a Dark Stranger" balances the dangers of wartime espionage and the ups and downs of a wartime romance, together with a heavy dose of slapstick comedy added in, masterfully. The ending is a real gem in not only with both David & Bridie tying the knot but the place, on David's part, where their to spend their honeymoon having such a negative impact on Bridie. If David had read a book on Irish History he would have known better then to choose the hotel where he and Bridie, who knew her history of Irland well, were to stay at!

edwagreen Deborah Kerr was 24 when she made this 1947 film. The N.Y.C. film critics loved Miss Kerr. She won the best actress award that year for this film as well as the equally awful "Black Narcissus."Deborah is Bridie Quilty in this film. Need I say more? She is an Irish lass with the tongue and brogue of Maureen O'Hara. She has been taught to hate the British despite the fact that there had been a 1921 peace treaty in Ireland.By 1944 in the film, at age 21, she is out to make her own way in life and soon gets caught up in a Hitchcock-like thriller with German spies, etc.The film is a bit confusing and dull to say the least. After finding the book, Bridie changes her ideas since she sees what the Nazis will do to both the British and Irish alike.The ending becomes basically slapstick and annoying to watch. The very end is even more ridiculous as well. This film was also known as "The Adventuress."