A good medley of all former spy-pictures can now be seen at the Uptown Theatre. The merits of "I Was a Spy" are numerous, the chief one being its realistic handling, its sincere action. The spy is, in the first place, a very ordinary very pretty country girl, and so there is no mixing of ball-room and bedroom diplomatics with firing-squad angelics. Madeleine Carroll shows that a Flemish variety of Mata Hari can play around with secret codes, drink-befuddled German officers, and counter-spies without help of a Circle-like reputation, and without confusing the issues by failing in love with a young brave of the enemy.

The most comprehensive good thing of this film is that it is a British Gaumont production, of their better and livelier sort. This results in careful but not clever photography, authentic Belgian scenes, a minimum of stock bombardment pictures and a pleasant understatement in love-scenes and in the gushier aspects of patriotism. There is a refreshing lack of grim firing-squads, father-confessors, aerial suicides, poisoned wine. For these melodramatic trappings are substituted the lesser tools of spycraft; viz, notes inside cigarettes, underground passages, patriotic badge under the coat-lapel, (two safety-plus sinister), secret knocks on window panes. Simplicity is the note. The spy, Madeleine Carroll, has a quiet love with quiet Herbert Marshall, her co-worker, does not fall into a titanic international one with her "objective," the local German bigwig. She is even unhistorically rescued at the end, after being condemned to death. One touch of war is thrown in. A German regiment, worshipping in an open field on a Sunday, is made one with God through the neat work of three British planes an unusual thing to see in a British-made film.

But the chief interest of this easygoing spy picture, as to story, is the spy-work operating slowly, on thousands of "mysterious cylinders, maps of prevailing winds, nose-blankets of cottonwool," showing how completely by surprise the first gas attack took the Allied military and intelligence forces in 1915. As to acting, the show is put over, as so many European ones are, by that arch-villain, Conrad Veidt. When America has brought that competent film star of Hollywood its movie personnel will be complete.