State Department: File 649

"State Department: File 649" is a film that is supposedly set in China. The film bebuted in February, 1949...and by October of the same year, the country had fallen to Mao and the Chinese Communists. This means that only a few months after the film was released, it was already obsolete.

As far as the film goes, it was produced by Sam Neufeld. This means that even with Cinecolor, the movie is a cheap affair--with none of the polish you'd find in a film from a major studio. Neufeld was known for cheap B-movies...and this one is as cheap as they come!

Something is up in China. The local American Consul knows something isn't right...but isn't exactly sure what. So, agent 649, Ken Seely (William Lundigan), is sent to Peking (before it was renamed Beijing) to investigate. Like Batman, Ken's parents were murdered long ago--though this was in Mongolia, not Gotham City.

So is this any good? No especially. Lundigan has little charisma and the quality of the production isn't great--with some sloppy edits and little to make it stand out in a positive way. Now I am not saying it's bad....just that it isn't very good. At best, an odd time-passer.

By the way, the copy I saw of this film was posted on one of the Roku channels. The copy they have is very poor--often extremely dark and grainy. This combined with the general shabbiness of the story make it a tough film for most viewers to watch and enjoy.

Ultra-cheap so-called thriller directed by the prolific (but not particularly talented) Sam Newfield under the pseudonym of Peter Stewart. A lot of talk and very little action makes for a dull experience.

You wouldn't expect a cold war drama with a title like that to be in colour, but here it is. (Soviet propaganda films of the period were also often in colour believe it or not.) Art director Edward Jewell also otherwise manages to suggest fairly lavish production values on a limited budget and the film was presumably waved through by the Breen Office as being politically useful in the grim new postwar climate (people get their tongues cut out and arms cut off - mercifully off camera - presumably to remind audiences just how dangerous the world still was outside the good old U. S. of A.)

Unfortunately, for all it's up to the minute, Torn-from-Today's-Headlines veneer Russia exploded its first atom bomb and China fell to the communists within months of the film's release in early 1949, rendering its storyline about a dastardly Chinese warlord even more irrelevant to current events; and it fell through a fissure in history that makes it interesting today for so precisely preserving a moment of faltering uncertainty and indecision as the tectonic plates of the United States' relations with the East began shifting in ways that still haven't settled yet.

This is a difficult film to review. William Lundigan plays a nicely heroic Amercian with a warm, charismatic radio-trained voice; Richard Loo is great as the temper-tantrum-throwing villainous warlord marshal, with Philip Ahn as his civilized aide-de-camp; and Victor Sen Yung is splendid as a heroic Chinese-American radio operator. There are also cute turns by Milton Kibbee (Guy Kibbee's brother) as a pot-bellied fur trader, Barbara Wodell as a hysterical neurotic, and plug-ugly ex-pro wrestler Henry 'Bomber' Kulky as a Mongolian (in your wildest dreams) sergeant-at-arms, but despite these little highlights, the whole film is excessively talky, suffers from a patriotic narrative introduction, features muddled motivations (would the State Department actually send a female secret agent to Mongolia to deal with the emotional problems of a depressed, piano-playing secretary???), is rather set-bound (are those the "Republic Rocks" i see out back in Mongolia?), and ends on a weirdly sudden note, thus removing it from any consideration as an undiscovered classic.

Also working against this film's revival or renewal of popularity is the plot line's firm tie to then current events. How many modern viewers will understand the backdrop of what the script refers to as "the present crisis" -- the fact that, in 1949, this meant the Communist take-over of China, with Mao Tse-Tung wresting control from the pro-American Generalisimo Chiang Kai Shek?

Communism might have made a credible opposing force to the heroic American men and women of the State department, but the film-makers apparently wanted to play it safe and, not knowing which way the cats were gonna jump in old Peiping, they inserted a stereotypical "Mongolian Warlord" figure as the opponent to America's interests, a "Yellow Peril" threat that was dated at the time and hasn't aged well since. There was an attempt to cover this anachronism in the screenplay by stating that the marshal's father had been a local "prince" and that he himself -- despite the fact that his followers are dressed in Maoist People's Army type uniforms -- are actually out of favour with the "central government" -- but the effect comes across as a fairly transparent screenwriter's ruse, because if the marshal was a Mongolian prince, educated at Oxford, then why were his foot soldiers wearing Maoist style clothing?

Campiest line in the story, delivered by Philip Ahn, after Richard Loo goes ape on Victor Sen Yung's communications set-up:

"The marshal is very angry. He has broken your radio."

Spoken in the voice of Monty Python's Michael Palin as Cardinal Ximenez, that would have been a classic! As it is, it's just weird.

Slow-moving Cold War cheapo without the courage of its convictions. In '48 the Chinese Civil War was in full swing-- red Mao vs. nationalist Chiang, with an outcome still in doubt. The Soviets half-heartedly supported the rebel Mao while the US supplied the nationalists. With the Cold War heating up across Europe and Asia, Hollywood began celebrating government agencies in what many saw as a first line of defense against communist penetration. Here, it's the State Department getting the cosmetic treatment. Note, for example, the celebratory prologue.

The impressively handsome Lundigan plays a Foreign Service officer sent to China to assist a besieged legation. There, while romancing colleague Bruce, he experiences the brutal machinations of a warlord (Loo) who's playing both warring sides against the middle. In short, the material implies a larger scale drama than what it receives from this indie production. At the same time, the script plays it safe, never once mentioning communists or Mao. Instead, they're referred to as rebels in the North, while the US maintains diplomatic ties with the government in the South. In short, the screenplay tries to clumsily finesse a critical issue of the day, while we read between the lines.

As other reviewers point out, there's much too much talk dominating the latter half, most of it within the cheap confines of warlord Loo's trailer! The gab adds up to a downer despite the fiery upshot. On a similar note, Lundigan's spiffy gray suit remains unblemished no matter the grimy surroundings-- no doubt a concession to the Service's image. Too bad director Newfield adds nothing to the pedestrian script. Some atmosphere would have helped

On the other hand, crowded scenes of the Chinese town are well done and fairly persuasive, even though the production never leaves greater LA (Iverson Ranch, and the studio). And what a neat burst of inspiration to couple the Chinese fire-eater with the American bubble-gum chewer. In my book, it may be the movie's highlight, an amusing pairing of East and West. At the same time, chubby little Michel just about steals the show from the stiffed-up adults.

All in all, the 87-minutes unfortunately adds up to a bigger bite than the meagre budget could chew.