cult film freak: DANA ANDREWS & MÄRTA TORÉN COVER 'ASSIGNMENT: PARIS'

Assignment: Paris Year: 1952 Rates: ***1/2

George Sanders, the classy, underrated and underused British actor who all but stole Alfred Hitchcock's FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT despite being third billed, is number three again and has plenty of time to stand out in the third act...

When mainline Dana Andrews, again playing a reporter like in another correspondent, BERLIN CORRESPONDENT, gets captured illegally, held hostage and whose enemies, in this case communist Yugo, winds up altering his voice, another BERLIN trait only more realistic as it's a far better picture...

And while some scenes aren't extremely thrilling for a Cold War thriller, there's good use of suspense, whenever needed...

Plus romance as Andrews puts on his kind of breezy, second-hand charm from the 1950's when, during this Lost Decade of drinking, he'd phone in some performances, even in decent films, as, for what's really a programmer, ASSIGNMENT: PARIS is... also starring love-interest ingenue Märta Torén, who co-starred with Dana in SWORD IN THE DESERT, and the cult noir starlet Audrey Totter, brooding around the Paris newspaper office jealous about Torén, two-fold.