Hotel Reserve

Espionage in the South of France, 1938.

The three producer-directors build up a tremendous effect of style in the locale, this is abetted by an exceptionally fine and rare score by Lennox Berkeley.

The film seems to have failed of any critical standing and to have gone unnoticed until Guy Hamilton rather drew upon it for his Poirot film, Evil Under the Sun.

“In a laughing Mediterranean way” a Nazi spy picks up the wrong camera to snap those new fortifications at Toulon, a bright young chap (James Mason) from Paris gets picked up by Naval Intelligence at the pharmacy when he goes to collect his prints, now it’s a matter of working amongst the guests or else, and they are all so charming or mad.