Waterfront (1944)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Just perfect...

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

PRC Studios ordinarily produced pretty rudimentary cinema. A handful of spare sets, few actors, few extras, studio bound. The plots were such that if the phrase "B Feature" didn't exist it would have had to be invented.This one, though, has an edge. The art direction isn't bad. No waterfront neighborhood ever existed like the ones we see in old movies -- sailors slouching around, hands in their pockets, cigarettes dangling from their lips, gathered in crowded little saloons with names like "The Anchor Bar," the narrow streets wreathed in cold fog. It's a fantasy waterfront but it works well enough.The performances are (mostly) decent as well, although I wasn't always on top of who had the little black book that was stolen from German agent J. Carrol Naish. Since everyone on the other side of the law seemed to be German, why would one agent hinder the operations of another? Well, the black book is just the MacGuffin anyway.Naish uses his go-anywhere accent. John Carradine is an impressive figure in a long black coat and black fedora. His figure is gaunt and his features sepulchral. Ominous all over, you know? And he's more reckless than the other spies. He wants to take over the gang in San Francisco and represent the Gestapo, although why he'd want to represent the German secret police instead of the intelligence agency, the Abwehr, the writers neglect to explain. I suppose the very word "Gestapo" generated chills.It's fast. Some of the Germans are forced to cooperate and others are completely unaware of what's going on, as is the viewer, occasionally.I kind of got a kick out of it.

1944's "Waterfront" is a reasonable example of a Poverty Row spy picture, this one from PRC rather than Republic or Monogram. None could be considered classics of course, generally set in the US and inexpensively confined to just a few tiny sets. What makes these stand out at all isn't the script but the actors involved, in this case John Carradine and J. Carrol Naish, both undercover Nazi agents working the San Francisco waterfront. Naish's Dr. Carl Decker is an optometrist in possession of a code book that can decipher the secret instructions for Carradine's Victor Marlow, newly arrived and impatient to get started. The film opens with the code book being stolen, and by the time it's over all the bad guys are captured or dead (no one comes off very smart). Just a few months before the iconic PRC "Bluebeard," Carradine relishes his villainy, playing his final Nazi role, while Naish provides good support, as do Edwin Maxwell and John Bleifer, veteran performers all. Actress Maris Wrixon previously worked with Boris Karloff in both Warners' "British Intelligence" and Monogram's "The Ape," and reunited with Carradine in Monogram's "The Face of Marble."

If you don't pay attention too closely, this is a fairly entertaining film. J. Carrol Naish is fine as the Nazi spymaster. John Carradine just wasn't sinister or psychotic enough to make his character believable, but was better than most of the rest of the cast, though John Bleifer stood out as the slimy, double-dealing blackmailer. I thought it was pretty well directed, too.I can see why the police arrested the male romantic lead, but if the FBI had really done their job he would have been quickly released, since he had no gun and none was recovered at the scene, had no gunfire residue on his hands (The paraffin test had been mentioned in movies of the 1930s.), and had a legitimate reason for being at the murder scene. Yet he went to trial for the murder. I don't know much about guns, but I recognized the iconic Luger pistol used by the murderer. The FBI identified the murder weapon as a Mauser. A pretty clumsy portrayal of the FBI for this marginally propagandistic spy drama.I watched a copy downloaded from The Internet Archive. The print from which the file was made had seen better days.

**SOME SPOILERS** Nothing new here in this B movie about a Nazi spy network working out of San Francisco. At the very beginning of the movie we see what's obvious the Brooklyn not Golden Gate Bridge as San Francisco optometrist Carl Decker, J. Carrol Nash, is mugged by this dock worker Adolf Mertz as he's leaving his office.Decker who's secretly working for the Nazi gestapo as a spy had this secret decoder book on him that Mertz took and is in no way going to report it to the police. It becomes certain that Mertz was no ordinary mugger but someone who knew how important that book is and now is willing to sell it back to Decker for a hefty price. Decker's controller Victor Marlow, John Carradine, is sent from Germany to check out Decker's progress and what he's up to but is really interested in taking over the Nazi West Coast spy operations himself.With the knowledge that the secret decoder book is in Mertz's hands both Decker & Marlow track him down to this gin mill on the docks named the Anchor Bar & Café owned by Oscar Zimmermann, John Bleifer, who also happens to be a Nazi spy. Marlow going on his own murders Mertz and dumps his body in San Francisco Bay but comes up empty with the secret book which ended up in Zimmermann's office safe. Zimmermann working together with Max Kramer,Edwin Maxwell, another Nazi spy seems to be completely ignorant of what Decker, the head Nazi spy in the city,is involved with! Which goes to show just how ineffective the entire Nazi espionage department was and why it had a lot to do with Germany untimely losing WWII. Meanwhile the treacherous Marlow is now targeting Zimmemann who's trying to blackmail him. This leads to Zimmerman getting himself shot and killed by Marlow as he came to his office, to hand over his blackmail money, who then ends up taking off with the decoder book.As all this is happening pretty German-American girl Freda Hauser, Maris Wrixon, who works for Kramer and in who's house Marlow is a tenant has him threatened her mother Emma, Olga Fabian, that if she doesn't let him stay there he'll have the gestapo put her family, who are stranded in Germany, in a Nazi concentration camp. Marlow is so ridicules that he's willing to reveal his being a Nazi spy and risking being executed just to stay at the Hauser home? Was the food and the room that he stayed at so good that it was worth losing his life for?Marlow somehow finds out that a frightened Kramer is about to spill the beans on his Nazi comrades by confessing, in writing, his involvement with the spy ring in order to get a lighter sentence. It's then that he again goes into action with him sneaking into Kramer's office and murdering him just to keep Kramer from not only talking to the police but implicating himself, and Decker, as well as being Nazi spy's.Things start to go very bad for Decker as his spy network of 19 men gets busted by the FBI and he goes into hiding in this waterfront dive only to have himself get tracked down and shot by his fellow Nazi spy Marlow. The ever so eager to impress his superiors back in Berlin Marlow not only feels that Decker let the Fatherland and his Fhurer down but that he can do a far much better job of spying on the United States.The police in the film are almost as incompetent as the Nazi spy's are as they mistakenly arrest Freda's boyfriend Jerry Donovan, Terry Frost, for the murder of her boss Kramer! This made no sense at all since he was Kramer's best friend and there was nothing stolen, except Kramer's secret confession, from his office. We later see what a total jerk Marlow is when Olga now not caring what happens to her relatives back in Germany tells her daughter Freda that he's is working for the Nazi gestapo and is spying on America, which the arrogant and not so bright Marlow himself told her! Both her and Freda decide to go to the police and have Jerry, who's being framed for Kramer's murder, released with this new and explosive piece of evidence. Marlow getting weirder and more obnoxious by the minute then tries to kidnap both Freda and Olga and take them back home with him to Nazi Germany? In a German U-boat? In the wild shootout that follows with the police who were alerted about Marlow's bizarre behavior, by a number of tenants in Olga's rooming house, he ends up getting cold-cocked by Butch, Billy Nealson, one of the tenants and falls down a staircase and on his head, no damage there. It's then that police come on the scene and grab and arrest him with Butch breaking his right fist that he smashed into Marlow's jaw.One of the lesser efforts by Hollywood in showing the American public how dangerous the Nazis were but as usual making them so ineffective that those watching the movie back then wondered to themselves how they got as far as they did in almost winning WWII, against more then three quarters of the world's population and nine tenths of it's economic power base, in the first place?