Murder in the Air

Murder in the Air (1940)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Fourth and final film in Warner's Brass Bancroft series with Ronald Reagan in the lead. This time out enemy agents are destroying various sites and now they have their eyes on destroying the entire country. Reagan goes undercover and gets inside the gang to try and stop them before more damage is done. This is probably the second best in the series (behind the third film) and fans of "B" movies will certainly have enough here to keep them entertained. The film, running just 55-minutes, makes for some nice entertainment because it throws pretty much everything in except for the kitchen sink but then again that might have ended up on the cutting room floor. The entire movie goes at a very fast pace and it leads up to a very good ending set on a Dirigible, which of course has to crash into the ocean. I wish this sequence would have gone on longer but what's here is nice. Reagan is very comfortable in the role and manages to turn in his best performance of the series. His tough act is a lot more believable here than in the previous three films and Eddie Foy, Jr. is back for comic relief. John Litel and James Stephenson co-star.

The fourth in the "Brass Bancroft" series is the best. Once again, RONALD REAGAN plays the confident government man whose job it is to expose spies led by JAMES STEPHENSON, the accented villain. It has the flavor of an extended Saturday afternoon serial, the kind that movie fans came to expect as a steady diet during the '30s and '40s.

All the ingredients for such an adventurous tale are here--a mysterious man with a tattoo on his arm; a ring of spies; good guys putting themselves into dangerous positions by posing as gangsters; and the inevitable conclusion with the spies efficiently disposed of by U.S. agents on their trail.

And once again, one gets the impression that Ronald Reagan was indeed being groomed for stardom as an Errol Flynn type of action star in his early days. He once described himself as the "Errol Flynn of the B-films" and it's an apt description.

Simplistic spy story made a year before Pearl Harbor, has its best moments when it uses actual footage from a dirigible disaster at sea with the footage blended evenly with studio scenes aboard the dirigible before it crashes. It's the last twenty minutes or so that makes the whole thing worth watching.

Fortunately for Reagan, it wasn't long after this one that the studio began putting him in A-films where he eventually earned his leading man status and became a dependable fixture throughout the forties.

You can't expect a lot from B movie series that were made to fill Saturday afternoons until it was time to show the A pic again. Which is good, because there isn't much here.

Except for a bizarre piece of science fiction called the Inertia Projector, that looks as if it were lifted directly from another Saturday afternoon serial, the Flash Gordon series. This thing shoots a light ray that is supposed to paralyze any sort of mechanical contraption. When it appears in the otherwise very realistic movie, it really seems to come from out - way out - in left field.

Others have joked about this being a precursor to the wacky Star Wars defense system that was proposed during the Reagan administration.

What I found more interesting is that this movie played into the real fear of enemy sabotage in this country a full year before Pearl Harbor.

There's no point in examining this movie too closely. Such movies were produced quickly and not designed to withstand close scrutiny. It was very much a product of its time, and while certainly not a great example of movie-making, decently done for what it was.

SYNOPSIS: Ronald Reagan, G-Men, Espionage, Airplanes....that about sums it up.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: American Government = Good / Foreigners = Bad. An entertaining propaganda film for its day. Supposedly, the 3rd in a series of G-Men pictures that Ronald Regan stared in. His character is named Brass Bancroft (Hollywood just doesn't use names like this anymore). Written and filmed during a time when the U.S. Government was never questioned and Communism was considered a mental plague and not a political view. It is easy to tell who the good guys are and you know the bad guys will be defeated in the end.

PROS AND CONS: I have a soft spot for the old days. Back in the day when even second rate B-Movies had some art and talent to them. These films reflected the audience that they were marketed toward which was middle class white Americans before World War II. The concept of ethnicity hadn't yet come to light, segregation was the norm. The government was a benevolent autocratic entity that could do no wrong. The film centers around science aviation and espionage, which back in the day was about as gee-wiz as you could get. There are shades of the Movie-Serials of the 40s as well as the coming paranoia of the communist conspiracy. If you want to see the roots of Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films, see pictures such as this.

One of the first things that was evident is that this film was produced on the studio lot. There is no location shooting and everything is shot on sound stage sets. What gives this away is the the lack of any ceiling on the interior shots and the shadows cast by the lighting. This gives the illusion that each room has 20 foot high ceilings that go up forever. This is pretty basic entertainment, meant to satisfy a pretty simple audience that didn't question much. Now, it is almost more entertaining for its simplicity and gullibility than anything else....and of course that the lead actor becomes president of the United States.

Murder In the Air was the fourth movie to star future President Ronald Reagan as agent Ross Bancroft. This is at present the only one of this series I've seen and was rather impressed.

A man with a tattoo of a circle and arrow is found dead after a rail crash and he turns out to be hobo with £50,000 on him. Bancroft and his sidekick are sent to investigate. The investigation eventually sends them onto an airship, Mason, which could be blown up...

Murder in the Air is worth catching if you get the chance as it is rather hard to get hold of. A good way of spending just under an hour.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.