Robert J. Maxwell Interesting exercise in style. Ray Milland is a physicist and a communist spy who passes secret information to his contacts. The FBI sniffs him out and the Party provides him with a new identity and passport to Cairo for his getaway. After accidentally causing the death of an FBI agent who has been following him, he makes it to the ship but then tears up his fake passport and turns himself in.Milland is in just about every shot and the whole exercise depends on him. He pretty much pulls it off. We very rarely get to read any written messages, but his expressions tells us much of what we need to know. He's tortured with guilt throughout. He sweats profusely, not from the heat but from the cupidity. And there are closeups of his face, so that the slightest change in his facial muscles registers on the Richter scale. The extreme closeups are sometimes odd -- a telephone receiver pressed against an ear -- but they tend to break up the sometimes irritating visual flow of figures coming and going without ever speaking. The director also breaks up the stream of traditional shot with some overhead angles.One of those figures doesn't have to speak. Rita Gam, as his provocative neighbor, slinking around in her loosely tied dressing gown, is astonishing sexy and extraordinarily attractive in an Arabic kind of way, an houri out of scripture, looking a little like a plump-lipped Cher. I don't know why Milland, before tearing up his fake identity, didn't move in with Rita Gam for a while. After all, the guy is in for a long stretch in the slams and maybe the hot seat. Might as well have one last fling. Looks like it would have been sufficiently memorable to last him a lifetime.But the film raises a question. Why make a film with no dialog? That is, what's the purpose behind imposing such a stricture on the production? Vladimir Nabokov once speculated on how successful a novel would be that avoided the use of the letter "e". It probably wouldn't be successful because the experiment would be pointless.Self-imposed limitations sometimes work. Hitchcock used only a lifeboat in the movie of the same name, but it generated a palpable sense of isolation and despair. But his experiments with long takes were pointless in "Rope" and "Under Capricorn." So-called concrete poetry strikes me as equally absurd -- poetry written in the shape of a rhomboid or a parallelogram. I have doubts about haiku in English as well, a form devised for use in a foreign language whose "syllables" don't correspond to English.In any case, the silence here is a little distracting, to be honest, but the story -- simple as it is -- is engaging enough to keep a viewer from being bored. And it took guts to make the movie.

1bilbo How different this film is to modern day mush!Ray Milland conveys everything you need to know about each scene with a facial expression or a slight nuance – we never see what the secret notes say but we don't need to. We also don't hear what the FBI agents say to each other as they work their strategy of tracking him – again we don't need to.The suspense is created by the smallest of mistakes – the tiny camera left on the desk, the film nearly found in the library. Also the woman in the flat – we would think she is a prostitute at first but in a later scene she is just a teaser – or was she an enemy agent placed in the building to watch him? The whole character is left to the viewer to decide.The photography is top notch – part of the atmosphere is here created, the film is worth watching for this alone.This film is for an intelligent audience who still have the capacity to work things out for themselves. I give it 9/10 only because the Empire building scenes were a little predictable – still a terrific film.

David Grant what a brilliant film (No words of course), A cold war spy thriller released in the USA 1952 15th October starring the suave Ray Milland. A spy in a cold war period,espionage,the last thing you will ever do is talk or as little as possible...A WORD WHISPERED IN THE EAR CAN BE HEARD FOR MILES. Chinese proverb...i don't think so I do not need to add anything else that has not already been stated, except that some say why bring such high profile star with such a distinctive voice to star in a silent film, well simply it would not attract as much interest with the general public, if they were to star some completely unknown Johnny Lunch-bucket, you get my drift While in the field... it remains to risky you may be bugged recorded etc.......you don't want leave messages for anyone else to copy or pick them up........but why has this film never been released on DVD region 2. I do not really need to add to what has already been said about this film.........but anyone out there who has the means and power of authority and money, please sort out a DVD region 2. we don't all live in the USA.

Zen Bones This is a pretty ambitious noir film that dared to tell its story without a single line of dialogue. It's plot is a bit hokey: a nuclear scientist who had agreed to pass on information to a fiendish band of communists (are there any other kind?) has second thoughts and must allude himself from their grasp. The film combines a wonderful mix of claustrophobic scenes of tension where our (anti)hero holes himself up in a small room while the phone rings menacingly (conjuring memories of Milland's brush with fear and paranoia in THE LOST WEEKEND), and terrific cat-and-mouse chase scenes that are truly Hitchcockian, including a climax on the top of the Empire State Building (how come Hitch never came up with that one?). Ray Milland does a terrific job as usual: one can almost hear his thoughts. And the cinematography is some of the most innovative you'll ever see outside an Orson Welles film. Don't get caught up in the idea that this is a 'gimmick' film. This is an innovative film, much in the same vein as some of the most inventive shows in THE TWILIGHT ZONE series. Try to open your mind to a fresh perspective and you won't be disappointed.