Rendezvous is a 1935 film directed by William K. Howard.
The time setting is 1917, after the United States has entered World War I. William Gordon (William Powell) is a newspaper reporter who has joined the Army with the declaration of war and been commissioned as a lieutenant. He meets and falls in love with flighty socialite Joel Carter (Rosalind Russell). William makes the mistake of mentioning to Joel that he is an amateur cryptographer who, under a pen name, wrote a well-known book on cryptography and code-breaking. Joel isn't just a socialite, she's a well-connected socialite—her uncle is the Assistant Secretary of War. She pulls some strings and William, much to his displeasure, is assigned to Washington and a cryptography unit instead of fighting on the front in France.
It turns out that William's job is very important. The Navy is setting up a convoy system to escort American troop transports to France. Major Brennan of British intelligence (Lionel Atwill) has devised a code to use to send the at-sea rendezvous point to the American escorts. However, a German spy ring has the code. With the US ships already steaming east, William must break the German spy ring before the spies can beam the coordinates to the U-boat fleet.
Cesar Romero appears as Nieterstein, a neutral diplomat who is actually part of the German spy ring. This film was the first starring role for Rosalind Russell, who got the part when Powell's regular co-star Myrna Loy went on strike, demanding a salary increase.
Tropes:
- As You Know: William and the federal agent explain to each other and the audience stuff they already know about how they caught the bad guys. Namely, the signal that Army intelligence sent out to the fleet was fake. William pretended to decode it for the German spies, but what he decoded and what they sent out was actually the coordinates to the hotel, which allowed the cops to arrive and rescue William.
- Beef Bandage: Joel gets into a fight with a cop at a suffragette protest. William comes to her aid, tries to punch the cop, but misses and punches Joel instead. Cut to the next scene where both of them are pressing slices of beef to their eyes.
- The Big Board: Maj. Brennan has a large wall map of Europe, the north Atlantic, and the eastern seaboard of the US and Canada, which he uses to explain to a bunch of officers and the movie's audience about the convoy system and how the Navy ships are going to rendezvous with the troop transports at sea.
- *Bleep*-dammit!: Not for an obscenity! The bad guys in this film were obviously spying for the Germans—it was World War I after all. But Hollywood studios in the mid-1930s were still trying to sell films in Hitler's Germany. So references to the spies being German in this film were censored, quite clumsily. A couple of times blasts of static obscure dialogue, and in one scene William Powell's dialogue is replaced by some horrible dubbing in a weird deep voice.
- The Ditz: Joel, high-spirited and feisty but not terribly bright. When it looks like William will be sent to France she buys him a bulletproof vest. Throughout she keeps butting in and jeopardizing William's counterintelligence operation, because she thinks he's actually going out with gorgeous Olivia.
- His Name Is...: Prof. Martin calls William with what he's figured out regarding the secret message on the advertisement. He says "The beauty circular, it's—" and at that moment a Hand of Death shoots him In the Back. William is at dinner with Olivia whom he knows by this point is a spy, so he has to keep talking normally even after Martin has been killed on the other end of the line.
- Honey Pot: The intelligence leak is Major Brennan's sexy mistress Olivia Karloff (Binnie Barnes), who is a spy for the Germans. After he finds her out, she kills him.
- Invisible Writing: The spy ring is in the habit of using this, like when they send Olivia a message in invisible ink written on a seemingly innocuous advertisement. William and his team can sometimes tell that there is an invisible ink message, but still not be able to read it since they don't have the reagent to make it show.
- Meet Cute: At a fancy party Joel mistakes William for a Russian opera singer. He rolls with it, talking to her in a fake Russian accent and kissing her hand theatrically.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: Ends with Joel running off the train platform, and William chasing after her, after he finds out that she has again gotten him assigned to desk duty.
- Race Against the Clock: The escorts are on their way to meet the troop transports, and they can only be reached with the coordinates by use of Brennan's code—which the good guys find out the Germans have. If William and his team transmit the code the U-boats will know where to go to sink the troop transports, and if they don't transmit the code the transports will go unescorted and get sunk anyway. So the only choice for William and the cops is to catch the whole German spy ring in the next three days, before it's time for the escorts to rendezvous with the transports.
- Ruritania: Nieterstein is a diplomat at the Marshovian embassy, who spies for the Germans in his spare time.
- Secret Test of Character: Brennan, suspicious of his mistress Olivia, arranges for her to think that she's received his secret documents. He doubles back to the apartment and catches her red-handed rifling through his papers. Unfortunately he does not consider the fact that she might have a gun, and she kills him.
- Sexy Backless Outfit: Olivia the Honey Pot wears such a dress for dinner with William, whom she's trying to seduce.
- Spy Fiction: A US Army cryptographer winds up hunting a German spy ring.
- Spy Speak: When Neiterstein gets valuable intelligence he calls his contact in San Diego and gives what sounds like investment advice, telling what stocks to buy at what prices, but which is actually coded intelligence. The San Diego spy then goes to Mexico to transmit the intelligence to Germany.
- Train-Station Goodbye: Subverted, because William and Joel's goodbye at the train station at the end is interrupted by a messenger delivering orders sending William back to desk duty, as Joel has pulled strings again.
