Following the over-budget and over-schedule shooting of Foreign Correspondent, both Hitchcock and the holder of his contract, David O. Selznick, were anxious that the director should turn out a film quickly and cheaply to prove to Hollywood that he was an accomplished professional. Partially as a favor to his friend Carole Lombard, Hitchcock directed the screwball comedy Mr. And Mrs. Smith (1941) at RKO Radio Pictures. A week into the shooting of the picture, Selznick's right-hand man Daniel T. O'Shea wrote to Selznick that Hitchcock was keeping on budget "...in order to demonstrate to the world after Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent that he is not only a great director but a reasonably priced one." The Lombard comedy came in on schedule and only slightly over budget.

After making only two films in America, Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent (both 1940), Alfred Hitchcock became one of the most publicly recognized movie directors. RKO commissioned a Gallup poll in October, 1940 which asked a cross-section of the population to identify four directors and their movies: Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Lewis Milestone. Hitchcock came in second to Capra, but the name-recognition for the British director was four times that of Ford and eight times that of Milestone.

While Hitchcock's anti-fascist message is evident throughout Foreign Correspondent, it was later reported that Nazi official Joseph Goebbels found the film very entertaining.

Following completion of Foreign Correspondent, and as a favor to producer Walter Wanger, Hitchcock shot a few additional scenes for the film The House across the Bay (1940), which had been directed by Archie Mayo. The scenes involved actors Walter Pidgeon and Joan Bennett on a plane; Wanger thought Hitchcock would be ideal for the scenes following the airplane sequence he had completed on Foreign Correspondent.

Working with humorist Robert Benchley on Foreign Correspondent may have given Alfred Hitchcock ideas about the future persona the director would take on in his television career. As John Russell Taylor wrote in his biography, Hitch, "[Hitchcock] had seen several of the shorts the woebegone, disenchanted comic had made, illustrated lectures by himself on such subjects as How to Sleep, A Night at the Movies, and The Sex Life of the Polyp, and had appreciated a dry, grotesque sense of humour not unlike his own. Years later hew was to remember the tone and format when devising his own famous introductory monologues for Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television."

by John M. Miller