Captain Scarface (1953)

hyped garbage

A Major Disappointment

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's pretty obvious as you watch CAPTAIN SCARFACE that the film was made for a relatively small budget and starred lesser actors. It's also obvious that the "big name talent" for the film (Barton MacLane) was given a very weird and unconvincing role in the film. He plays Captain Scarface--a Russian maniac who sounded most of the time like he was doing a Bela Lugosi impersonation. While MacLane is a fine villain in films, he never really had a lot of range--this assignment was clearly outside his abilities. However, despite this as well as a rather abrupt ending to the movie, the film does work reasonably well--thanks to good writing.The plot involves a duplicated merchant ship that replaced the real one once it was torpedoed. The plan is to sail this fake cargo ship into the Panama Canal and explode an atomic bomb on board. The baddies are all Russian Communists bent on harming America. However, what the Ruskies don't know is that an American (Leif Erickson) has replaced a Russian collaborator, as he is sure something is amiss with this strange boat. With Erickson's help, the few passengers aboard the ship learn that death awaits them and so they work together (mostly) to stop the attack.This film is an interesting curio from the Red Scare and came out the same year Stalin died. Today, many might see the film and laugh at its seemingly paranoid and silly plot, but at the time this sort of film appealed to fears that Communism would engulf the globe. It gives us some insight into the people and the times. And, unlike some propaganda films of the era, this one is reasonably well done and quite interesting. Well written, aside from a very abrupt ending, it's worth a look.By the way, you gotta love the way they chose names for this film. One of the guy's names is Perro ("dog") and the boat is called the El Baño (though it's missing proper accent mark) which means bathtub or bath. Pretty goofy.

Fun show to watch instead of the oft repeated reruns on TV. Saw it on TCM channel. No advertising was even better.The ship is the S.S. Banos. On the positive side, was it named after the city? Baños is located on the northern foothills of the Tungurahua volcano. The city is named after the hydrothermal springs of mineral water located around the city.Baños, pronounced correctly in the movie, is also Spanish for bathrooms (plural).Unintended or ?

(Some Spoilers) One of many likewise movies released during the Cold War about the Commies, at home as well as in the USSR, trying to do their utmost to not only destroy our way of life. In this case destroy our, the Free Worlds, transportation centers and cause world wide panic and economic chaos by blowing up the vital Panama Canal. This will cause US shipping to travel almost 8,000 miles around South America, from San Fancisco to New York City, to get where it has to go without the use of the short-cut canal.Having blown up the banana boat "Banos" and replaced it with a ringer, another boat that looks just like it, the Communist operative Captain "Scarface" Trednor, Barton MacLane, is planning to use it as a guided missile, with him doing the guiding, by plowing it into the locks of the Panama Canal. Setting off an atomic device that he has hidden on the ship Capt. Scarface plans to blow himself his crew and the canal to smithereens. The captain just has one little problem he needs someone who knows just what button, the red or the blue, to push to both activate and set the bomb off!Having gotten German nuclear physicist Dr. Yager, Raldolph Anders, out of a Soviet Gulag the Commies want to dupe him into pushing the button by threatening to murder his daughter Isa, Virginia Grey, if he doesn't. Things would have gone all down hill for the good guys, the Free and Democratic World, if it wasn't for this scuzzy looking ship-hand Clegg, Paul Brineger. Scarface wanted to screw Clegg out of his pay in doing the Captains dirty work, sinking and killing everyone on the "Banos". It's that capitalistic disease, wanting to get paid for working, that in the end did the Scarface crew in by bringing the hero of the movie All-American, blond and blue eyed, Sam Wilton (Leif Erickson) on board. Sam had his own troubles and they didn't have to do with him having the burden on his head of saving the free world.With Clegg confronting this Soviet Agent Kroll, John Mylong, in his hotel room whom Scarface told him to contact, in getting his pay, he ended up killing Kroll. Clegg is then shot and killed himself, by the hotel manager, where Sam is staying and looking to check out of the country, San Brejo. Sam finds a golden opportunity in getting his hands on the dead Krolls passport and using it to get on the banana boat "Banos" to take him back to the states; not realizing that it's set to go off in a nuclear explosion at the entrance of the Panama Canal Zone. The rest of the movie has Sam impersonating Kroll and then finding out that he's, Kroll, not only a commie. The ships Captain Scarface is using Kroll to talk the very reluctant Dr. Yarger, who the real Kroll supposedly helped escaped from a Soviet Gulag, to push the magic button. With Isa on board we also have the handsome and clean cut looking Sam get to win her over, after she at first thought that he was that rotten Commie swine Kroll, and together with her and a number of other passenger Sam gets the drop on Scarface and his Commie. In the end has his entire mad and grandiose plan ends up at the bottom the Bermuda Triangle. Sam & Co. finally puts an end to this whole master plan on the part of Scarface and his Commie leaders in Moscow. Scarface and his commie cohorts who for all their smarts just couldn't find anyone, this in 1953 when the Soviet Union had both the Atomic and Hydrogen bomb, who knows where to push the right button in order to blow up the Panama Canal.

This is a good B-grade action feature that makes good use of an involved story of intrigue. It's an example of how low-budget, shabby looking sets can actually help the atmosphere if they go with the right story, and meanwhile the story itself moves at a decent pace as things gradually unfold.Barton MacLane and Leif Erickson are the stars and antagonists. MacLane is "Captain Scarface", who is masterminding an evil and destructive scheme, while Erickson is a character designed as a Bogart-type antihero who finds himself in the right place and time to try to stop it. Erickson is solid in his role, while MacLane seems to relish his slightly outlandish character, making him interesting and menacing, if not always fully believable.All of the action takes place either at a shabby-looking port-side hotel or on the captain's equally rundown-looking freighter. The no-frills look of both sets makes them believable and helps the atmosphere, since putting the characters in such settings implicitly makes them too seem rather small and tattered.The story itself is easily interesting enough to hold your attention for the running time of slightly more than an hour. The actual plot of the bad guys comes across as somewhat far-fetched, but it is mostly a device to drive the intrigue. The story telling has a few rough edges, as can sometimes be the case with movies of this kind, but it has more than enough pluses to cancel these out. It's definitely worth seeing if you like movies of the genre.