Postal Inspector

I kept singing "You've never seen anything like it" from Doctor Dolittle as I watched this because I hadn't seen anything like it.

Ricardo Cortez plays a postal inspector who meets up with a nightclub singer on a plane having trouble landing. The singer sings a song to help calm everyone. The plane lands and we find that the singers manager is Bela Lugosi a Mexican business man in deep with the mob. After several scenes of Cortez showing what a postal inspector does the singer takes a shower and sings. A friend of Cortez is actually wooing the singer and everyone ends up at a night club where we get another song. Lugosi finds out that the younger inspector is going to be moving some old currency so he plots to steal it so he can get out of debt. A flood happens as the robbery goes down. There's another song before Cortez springs into action.

All that and more in an hour.

As odd mixes of genre's go I'd be hard pressed to come up with one as loopy as this.

I have no idea if I liked it, but I do know its a unique viewing experience. If you want to see how to put mutually exclusive genres together and make it kind of work this is the movie for you. See it and you too can sing that you've never seen anything like it...

I doubt that any movie ever made better use of stock footage of floods than "Postal Inspector." Every time the tale sags -- or more accurately sogs -- it's back to some unfortunate town where the river is rising, the dam done burst, homes are being washed away and people are trudging through muck and mire (not to be confused with the vaudeville act of the same name,) trying to escape the deluge. The big chase scene even replaces cars and horses with speedboats. The plot centers on Bela Lugosi as a night club owner, drowning in debt, who tries to steal $3 million in old bills being transported by the US Post Office. Fortunately, Ricardo Cortez is there to sink him, aided by Patricia Ellis as a night club singer who manages to warble a few Frank Loesser tunes before the water rises. It's actually not a bad little thriller and manages to float along in a fast-moving 58 minutes.

This was long thought to be a lost film, but it has been resurrected using a number of different prints so quality varies, but entertainment is still consistent. This is an odd film being a mixture of genres namely thriller,disaster, musical and quasi-documentary about the post office. A number of crimes involving the post office are shown mainly tragic, but a couple are very funny. Eventually it centres on a train robbery of old banknotes en route to the federal mint. Ricardo Cortez is all suave self assurance as the leading detective assigned to the case, while Patricia Ellis is drop dead gorgeous as a chanteuse who may be involved with the robbery. Bela Lugosi as a club owner with links to a gambling syndicate only has a small role. Last part of the film takes place in a flood with stock footage lifted from the Johnstown flood interspersed with new studio shot scenes which blend quite well. Some may dislike the jingoistic tone of the film regarding the post office, but the movie fairly zips along and the denouement is exciting.

Postal Inspector (1936)

*** (out of 4)

A city is being ravished by a flood when a group of criminals (including Bela Lugosi) decide to steal three million from the post office, which gets the postal inspector (Richard Cortez) involved. I was really shocked to see how much I liked this little film that has some wonderful comic moments dealing with various ways people get ripped off and the ending was full of great action. The special effects of the city being ripped apart by water were all very well done, although some stock footage was used. An interesting note was that this was Lugosi's final film for Universal under his Dracula contract.

1936's "Postal Inspector" appeared to serve several purposes for cash strapped Universal following the March 1936 ouster of the extravagant Laemmles: a Warners-style glorification of a rarely spotlighted branch of government, a vehicle cheaply built around newly shot stock footage of heavy flooding in Pittsburgh PA, and a way to fulfill their three picture contract with Bela Lugosi, having failed to use him on "Dracula's Daughter" or a fourth pairing with Boris Karloff (they would finish Karloff's deal in Feb. 1937 with "Night Key"). Not only that, but this innocuous programmer also had the audacity to feature Patricia Ellis as Connie Larrimore belting out a whopping four songs by the film's midpoint, making for an awkward musical enabling her songbird to trill at the nightclub owned by Lugosi's Gregory Benez, his kindly nature hiding a dark secret of being heavily in debt to an impatient loan shark who has already murdered a previous client. The plot finally settles in at the 40 minute mark, as Benez and his confederates choose to rob a shipment of $3 million worth of retired currency (the driver a fatal casualty), a crime that could be pinned on Charlie Davis (Michael Loring), brother of Postal Inspector Bill Davis (Ricardo Cortez), because his car was used by the thieves. Severe flooding in Milltown finds cops and robbers engaging in a speedboat chase until the villains are apprehended and Charlie is free to wed childhood sweetheart Connie. More romantic trifle than serious drama, the daily activities in the inspector's office offering some novelty as many people are defrauded through the mail, basically those who can least afford it. Offbeat enough to still provide light entertainment as an hour long programmer, but little material for Lugosiphiles, 4th billed Bela on screen for barely 7 minutes in a bland role that still shows he was capable of playing a character without any sinister shadings, the main reason for film buffs to seek out after missing in action for decades.