One of two espionage thrillers Alfred Hitchcock made in 1936, Secret Agent derives from the stories of W. Somerset Maugham. The byzantine operations of intelligence services during the First World War provides a framework for a characteristically witty exploration of point-of-view, duplicitous encounters, and the narrative power of objects. An extraordinary sequence in a Swiss church demonstrates the force of Hitchcock's British Catholic imagination and eerily anticipates the early films of Terence Davies.