State Secret

State Secret (1950)

ADVENTURE SWEEPING ACROSS A CONTINENT!

While working in England, an American surgeon Dr. John Marlowe is invited to Vosnia (a fictitious East-European country) to receive an award and demonstrate his life-saving surgery. Unwittingly caught in the middle of a dangerous and corrupt series of political events, Marlowe then becomes the object of a shoot-to-kill, vicious pursuit. Fleeing, he seeks help from an English-speaking actress, Lisa Robinson, and the two attempt to escape across the treacherous mountains of Vosnia.

Date of release
1950-09-11
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (18)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Thriller, Drama, Romance, Mystery
Director
Sidney Gilliat

Casting

Interesting facts

State Secret is a 1950 British drama thriller film directed by Sidney Gilliat and starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Jack Hawkins, Glynis Johns, Olga Lowe and Herbert Lom. It was made at Isleworth Studios with Italian location shooting in Trento and the Dolomites. It was released in the United States under the title The Great Manhunt.

Production

Gilliat got the idea for making the film from a newspaper article he read shortly before the Second World War. He decided that it would make a "chase thriller" in the style of films he had written for Alfred Hitchcock and Carol Reed, notably The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich. He found it difficult to do during the war years but reactivated it after the war.

The fictitious "Vosnian" language was constructed for the film by a linguistics expert, combining Latin and Slavic elements.

The star role went to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who had made a number of British films in the 1930s and was keen to work in the country again. His casting was announced in May 1949.

Fairbanks later said: "We have definitely reached a One World status in pictures. British comedy and character acting do not seem remote to us any more."

In July it was announced that another Hollywood star would play the female lead but by August Glynis Johns had got the role.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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