Cavalcanti is best known in this country for his direction of the ventriloquist episode in Dead of Night, but his career is a remarkable one that spans well over 50 years, from his work in the Twenties with the French avant-garde to his return after World War II to his native Brazil to revitalize that country's film industry (his work there is considered to have paved the way for Cinema Novo). In the years in between, Cavalcanti worked in England, first as a leading figure, along with Grierson, in the great decade of the British documentary, and then as a director for Ealing Studios, when he produced some of his finest works, including those presented tonight.

"Cavalcanti was Britain's only real noir specialist, and in the Forties he turned out both traditional and unorthodox noir subjects. This wartime propaganda film, written by Graham Greene, is rather like a Hitchcock script suddenly turned over to Buñuel to direct, full of beauty, black humor and sudden savagery. An important film, still insufficiently known and appreciated, brought back to Berkeley for the first time in many years." --W.K. Everson. Made at the height of the invasion scare in England, the story concerns the infiltration of an unsuspecting British village by 60 German paratroopers.