Menzies was primarily an art director (Gone with the Wind, 1939) but directed a few good movies, often low-budget films for double bills. Address Unknown is in beautiful black-and-white and portrays the political seduction of a German-born American art dealer (Paul Lukas) who goes to Germany on business and is caught up in the Nazi web when Hitler comes to power. The daughter (K.T. Stevens) of his Jewish partner (Morris Carnovsky) comes with him, to start her acting career, leaving behind her betrothed, Lukas's son (Peter Van Eyck). When Stevens appears on the Berlin stage she puts back into the play words that the Nazi censors had eliminated; she is denounced as a Jew and chased out of the theatre and shot to death on Lukas's doorstep after he slams the door on her. When Van Eyck hears of her death he sends nonsense letters to Lukas, ostensibly written by his father, which the Nazis think are illegal code and come to arrest and torture Lukas.
The plot and the time period of Address Unknown are a bit sketchy but the film is visually and emotionally effective. The cinematographer is Rudolf Mate, who photographed Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Lubitsch's brilliant satire of Nazis To Be or Not to Be (1942) and later directed the great iilm noir D.O.A.(1949). Mate and Menzies create a claustrophobic and increasingly darkening world that was closing in on Lukas and Germany..
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