by Richard T. Jameson
Special to MSN Movies

As Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated time and again, terrific spy movies can be made without a real spy at their center. Start instead with a regular person -- tourist, factory worker, ad man -- whom accident, circumstance or the maneuvering of a genuine spy puts on the spot. The amateur is then obliged to conduct himself as though he really were a secret agent, perhaps to spoil the bad guys' plans, but in any event to save his own skin.

Two of our favorites fit this profile. One is "Five Graves to Cairo," a gorgeous specimen of Paramount showmanship Billy Wilder co-wrote and directed in 1943. Franchot Tone plays a British soldier who, the lone survivor of a WWII tank crew, staggers into an all-but-abandoned hotel in the Libyan desert. With the complicity of the owner (Akim Tamiroff), he assumes the identity of a servant killed in a recent air raid. That's fine, till Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, no less, comes rolling in to make the hotel his temporary HQ. Seems the deceased was a German agent from whom Rommel expects a report, and Tone -- in civilian life a mere clerk in an insurance office -- has to do some fancy improvising. Did we mention that Rommel is played by Erich von Stroheim?

Hitchcock's enchanting 1938 comedy-thriller "The Lady Vanishes" arguably owed as much to its screenplay by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat as it did to Hitch's direction. Twelve years later, Gilliat wrote and directed and Launder produced "The State Secret," in which brilliant American surgeon Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is invited to demonstrate his newly perfected technique in a scenic little European dictatorship with a sea on one side and the Dolomite Mountains on the other. Midway through the procedure he realizes that patients have been switched and he's operating on the dictator himself, even as a look-alike is standing in publicly for the ruler. Tricky, but not quite cause for panic ... until the dictator dies, and the doctor, suddenly the man who knows too much, runs for his life. Among the challenges Fairbanks has to contend with is not knowing the language of the country -- hardly surprising since, in addition to devising delicious suspense situations, Gilliat made up a whole new language for the occasion! Jack Hawkins, Glynis Johns and Herbert Lom co-star, and the photography is by "Third Man" cameraman Robert Krasker. This is our favorite Hitchcock movie Hitchcock didn't make.

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