Most Likely if the song Mona Lisa had not been introduced in Captain Carey, USA, the film would have been listed as another of Alan Ladd's routine action/adventure films with a noir twist. However with Nat King Cole's mega-hit blaring from every other radio station and jukebox of the day the film's immortality is guaranteed.
This film's is Ladd's second excursion in the OSS as he played the lead role in an earlier film OSS. He is an OSS operative in northern Italy operating in the basement of a castle with the connivance of the daughter of the countess who owns the place. Ladd and the daughter Wanda Hendrix get a little wartime romance going between acts of sabotage. However someone betrays them and Ladd is wounded and was not summarily executed by the Nazis because in fact he is in uniform and strictly speaking not a spy. The same could not be said for 27 villagers who were killed for partisan activity. Ladd is freed by the allied advance and spends months recuperating.
Flash forward five years and he sees a painting that was stored in that basement hideout in an art gallery in New York. That renews his interest in finding out who sold him out. Back in the scene of his wartime exploits he finds Hendrix quite alive, not like he thought and married to Francis Lederer and still living at home with the regal and imperious lady of the manor, Celia Lovsky. Trying to ferret out information Ladd isn't exactly welcomed back by the townspeople as they remember those people shot in reprisal, but of course he stays the course and gets to the truth.
Not exactly an original plot and if you can't figure out who the betrayer is 20 minutes into the film you aren't a film buff. The film was directed by Mitchell Leisen who wasn't exactly at his best in the action/adventure tinged with noir adventure. But Leisen was a set designer before being a director and he does do a nice job in recreating Northern Italy without the benefit of on site location shooting.
And of course there is the song Mona Lisa which is sung in Italian as the 'cool it the Nazis are around' signal for Ladd. It got an Academy Award for Best Song in 1950 the first ever given to a non-musical film. Besides Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby sang it a lot on his radio program because it was a Paramount film and Bing always tried to use his studio's material when he could. Later on he did a tribute album for Decca records of his contemporary singing rivals and Mona Lisa was on that album for Nat King Cole.
Ladd and Wanda Hendrix didn't set the world on fire as a screen team. I have a feeling Ladd didn't want to get too close to her. At the time Wanda was married to Audie Murphy and in Tony Curtis's memoirs he relates that Murphy was a very jealous man with a hair trigger temper and lots of weaponry around. Which is why he went out of his way to be circumspect when they worked together. In fact only once in Ladd's whole career were there affair rumors about him and a leading lady and no it wasn't Veronica Lake.
Captain Carey, USA is your basic routine action/adventure film that just happened to have an Oscar winning song in it.
This film's is Ladd's second excursion in the OSS as he played the lead role in an earlier film OSS. He is an OSS operative in northern Italy operating in the basement of a castle with the connivance of the daughter of the countess who owns the place. Ladd and the daughter Wanda Hendrix get a little wartime romance going between acts of sabotage. However someone betrays them and Ladd is wounded and was not summarily executed by the Nazis because in fact he is in uniform and strictly speaking not a spy. The same could not be said for 27 villagers who were killed for partisan activity. Ladd is freed by the allied advance and spends months recuperating.
Flash forward five years and he sees a painting that was stored in that basement hideout in an art gallery in New York. That renews his interest in finding out who sold him out. Back in the scene of his wartime exploits he finds Hendrix quite alive, not like he thought and married to Francis Lederer and still living at home with the regal and imperious lady of the manor, Celia Lovsky. Trying to ferret out information Ladd isn't exactly welcomed back by the townspeople as they remember those people shot in reprisal, but of course he stays the course and gets to the truth.
Not exactly an original plot and if you can't figure out who the betrayer is 20 minutes into the film you aren't a film buff. The film was directed by Mitchell Leisen who wasn't exactly at his best in the action/adventure tinged with noir adventure. But Leisen was a set designer before being a director and he does do a nice job in recreating Northern Italy without the benefit of on site location shooting.
And of course there is the song Mona Lisa which is sung in Italian as the 'cool it the Nazis are around' signal for Ladd. It got an Academy Award for Best Song in 1950 the first ever given to a non-musical film. Besides Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby sang it a lot on his radio program because it was a Paramount film and Bing always tried to use his studio's material when he could. Later on he did a tribute album for Decca records of his contemporary singing rivals and Mona Lisa was on that album for Nat King Cole.
Ladd and Wanda Hendrix didn't set the world on fire as a screen team. I have a feeling Ladd didn't want to get too close to her. At the time Wanda was married to Audie Murphy and in Tony Curtis's memoirs he relates that Murphy was a very jealous man with a hair trigger temper and lots of weaponry around. Which is why he went out of his way to be circumspect when they worked together. In fact only once in Ladd's whole career were there affair rumors about him and a leading lady and no it wasn't Veronica Lake.
Captain Carey, USA is your basic routine action/adventure film that just happened to have an Oscar winning song in it.