Highly Dangerous (1950)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 30 minutes runtime, rated 5.9 by 573 cinematizens.
Genre: Spy Fy with some Sy Fy for spice.
Verdict: Fun.
Margaret Lockwood takes a train, again, and adventures follow, again. An entomologist, she knows a bug or two. James Bond was on hols, so she is recruited – ineptly – for a mission to darkest Rurantania behind the Ironclad Curtain because there are rumours of germ warfare developments there. Bugs, germs they are all one to her. It is all in the tradition of British amateurism of the S.O.E. (Look it up.)
To amuse her nephew she has followed the exploits on the radio of a super-spy called Conway. (This must surely be a reference a Dick Barton alias.) When she agrees to accept the mission, instead of going to Torquay, she takes the cover name of Conway.
Once in Rurantania she encounters a cocky American journalist and troubles follow. Soon she is arrested and rather than being tortured – ‘So old fashioned; so unreliable,’ says the chief of the secret police – she is shot full of drugs, where upon — Spoiler alert — in delirium she becomes Conway, and soon escapes from prison, drags the confused journalist with her to break into the super secret germ warfare shed, steal vital samples, and abscond by – of course – taking the next train.
For the time it is quite unexpected that she is the action figure, and the journalist tags along very reluctantly as she starts fires, cuts barbered wire, crawls through forests, drugs attack dogs, clonks armed guards, and pockets specimens of deadly bugs. Moreover, it is the only film from this period in which a man is not amazed that a woman is a scientist. This trope remains common in science fiction into the 1970s, but there is not a scintilla of it here. Credit is due.
Conway also took trains in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Night Train to Munich (1940). According to the biography on the IMDb her father worked for a railway company so maybe she had a Lifetime Rail Pass.
Eagle eyes may spot an uncredited Anton Differing at the train station at the end, wearing uniform well, as he always did. If there were an Oscar for uniform wearing it would be his.