In 1945, Variety could already claim that Confidential Agent, set in 1938, was "dated for these times"--even though it attempts to show how the Fascist victory in Spain was a red carpet for their rampage in the war just ended. James Agee was one of the few critics to appreciate the film despite its faults of pacing and atmosphere (which, incidently, seem endemic to Hollywood's Spanish Civil War stories, though cinematography by the likes of Rudolph Maté, in Blockade, and James Wong Howe in this film, is always of interest). Agee wrote, "Confidential Agent is a surprisingly serious translation of Graham Greene's thriller about a Spanish Republican who came to England to negotiate a coal deal for his government and ran into a kind of nightmare-cartoon of the cruelty, treachery, stupidity, and hopelessness of the period.... Charles Boyer, imaginatively cast, gives the agent a proper balance of incongruous frailty, incompetence, tragic responsibility and moral courage.... The various capitalists, workers, fascists, thugs, scientific idiots, idealistic imbeciles, and perfidious undergrounders of Greene's fable are played with unhoped-for edge and earnestness...."