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Monday, May 24, 2021

WATERFRONT (1944)

Americanized as director Steve Sekely, Austro-Hungarian war refugee István Székely must have been glad of steady employment anywhere, even Poverty Row Hollywood.  Here, it’s Producers Releasing Corporation, an outfit to make MONOGRAM PICTURES look like M-G-M.  Yet, even under these circumstances, you can tell he knows what he’s doing, especially in the first half of this Nazi Fifth Columnists story.  If only you could see it.  Subfusc copies the norm, so a largely nighttime undercover spy drama must be seen through a glass darkly, very darkly.  A shame since John Carradine is just the man to play a Nazi spy combing the San Francisco waterfront district to find fellow traveler/optometrist J. Carrol Naish, only to discover Naish has just been robbed, his ‘little black book’ of codes & contacts gone missing.  Calmly murdering even sympathizers once he gets what he needs, Carradine also enjoys serving up a bit of blackmail, threatening to expose a landlady’s relatives back in Germany when she points to a No Vacancy sign.  Before that, an elaborate meet-cute for two spies as Carradine recites ridiculous passwords while pretending to have his eyes examined; and later a neat scene where a detective sweats thru an interrogation while his suspect stays cool as a cucumber.  So what if the script falls apart in the third act, a decent looking print might have saved the day.  Not that we’ll ever know.

DOUBLE-BILL: Carradine starred in many a crappy B-pic between prestige supporting gigs.  One of the best he made that year (#9 of 11, also at PRC), BLUEBEARD for Edgar G. Ulmer, good enough to hope for a better print to turn up before having a look.

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