Actor Peter Lorre (1904)

Invisible Agent (1942), an American action and spy film directed by Edwin L. Marin with a screenplay written by Curt Siodmak, follows the story of Frank Griffin Jr. He is the grandson of the original Invisible Man, who now operates a print shop in Manhattan using the name Frank Raymond. Late one night, four armed individuals enter his shop and reveal their identities as foreign agents working for the Axis powers. Among them are Conrad Stauffer, an S.S. lieutenant general, and Baron Ikito, a Japanese agent. They demand to obtain the invisibility formula and threaten harm if it is not handed over. Despite managing to flee ...

Casablanca (1942) is a romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz. The main characters, played by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid, find themselves in the city of Casablanca during World War II. Rick Blaine, an American expatriate who runs ‘Rick’s Café Américain’, welcomes all types of patrons to his club – Vichy French officials, Nazi Germans, refugees seeking a way to the United States, and those looking to take advantage of ...

The American film noir, The Maltese Falcon (1941), follows a San Francisco private detective as he navigates the schemes of three immoral adventurers who are all vying for possession of a valuable falcon statuette. Directed and written by John Huston in his debut as a director, the movie is based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel of the same name. At the start of the film, Spade and Archer take on a new case when Ruth Wonderly arrives seeking assistance in finding her sister, who has supposedly run off to San Francisco with a man named Floyd Thursby. After ...

Alfred Hitchcock’s espionage thriller film, Secret Agent (1936), is based on the play by Campbell Dixon. During World War I on 10 May 1916, British Captain and novelist Edgar Brodie returns from leave to discover his own obituary in the newspaper. He is then approached by an unknown man, ‘R’, who offers him a secret mission: to eliminate a German agent heading to Arabia with plans to cause chaos in the Middle East. Brodie agrees and is given a new identity as Richard Ashenden, along with a fake death. He is also partnered with an assassin known as ...