Espionage Agent

Want to know how much difference a director can make? Watch this film, with Joel McCrea as a blundering American naïf in Europe on the eve of World War II exposing an Axis spy plot under the hacky direction of Lloyd Bacon, and then watch "Foreign Correspondent," which McCrea made the next year in a similar role, similar plot, at least one supporting cast member (Martin Kosleck) in common and even another sequence set during a rainstorm -- but under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. "Espionage Agent" isn't a bad movie and it probably would be a lot more likable if McCrea hadn't made "Foreign Correspondent" (albeit playing a terminally naïve journalist instead of a terminally naïve diplomat) a year later.

Incidentally, the comment by "bkoganbing" is wrong. Though the film begins in 1915, it quickly leaps forward to 1936 (the year the Spanish Civil War broke out) and the bulk of it takes place in the late 1930's -- though, even so, the German uniforms are otherwise correct but their armbands are missing the swastika. Even after making "Confessions of a Nazi Spy" (which was about Nazi abuses in the U.S., not in their homeland), Warners was still being skittish about directly taking on the German government.