Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 June 07 • Friday

In The Clouded Yellow (1951) Trevor Howard plays a British secret agent who gets fired after a mission goes wrong. Looking for something else to do, something different, he takes a job helping an amateur lepidopterist catalogue a butterfly collection.

After settling down to live and work in his employer's estate, however, he discovers a Hitchcockian plot to destroy an attractive young woman. When this woman gets framed for murder he helps her escape and uses his tradecraft experience to elude capture, first by the police and then by another secret agent dispatched to take him down.

The movie thus proceeds from Notorious to The 39 Steps and then to a prototype of the situation that would, decades later, form the plot of First Blood.

But the really interesting thing to me was the beginning, which is a mirror image of another British secret agent story, one about a spy who quits instead of getting fired.

Coincidence?