Desenmascarados

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.

Murder In The Air marked the conclusion of future president Ronald Reagan as two fisted, hard hitting Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft with Eddie Foy, Jr. as his sidekick. It's got every ingredient a B film for the Saturday matinée crowd should have, spies with tattoos, a secret weapon, and a two timing double crossing dame who nearly ends it for our hero.

Although the spies are never outrightly identified as German, the head guy talks with a Teutonic accent, all the bad guys have German sounding names, and they all have the same tattoo on the arm. When a body turns up Philadelphia with a lot of cash and a letter in invisible ink to a guy the US government has been looking to nail for espionage, Ron is sent in undercover taking the dead guy's identity.

These spies have something big in mind, to steal the plans of a secret weapon, a ray that can paralyze electrical currents. The weapon is called the Inertia Projector and its years in advance before the term laser came into general use.

The femme fatale in the plot is Lya Lys who is best remembered for being robbed of all her blood in The Return Of Doctor X by Humphrey Bogart. She's the wife of the dead guy Reagan is masquerading as and she nearly cooks Reagan's act. Good thing Ron was thinking fast on his feet here.

The film was written around some real footage of the USS Macon dirigible crash and incorporated in Murder In The Air. It's the best thing about the movie, the way Warner Brothers skilfully edited the disaster film footage into this movie.

My big question is how come the ray wasn't used the following year at Pearl Harbor against the Japanese?

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.

Harmless escapist fun, with Reagan as Brass Bancroft again.

He and Foy aren't bad together, but the "bad guys" are collectively awful.

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.