Waterfront

There's not much to say about Waterfront. It's a typical PRC production with the usual cheap sets and corny dialog and a cast of forgettable players for the most part. It's also a product of its times, a World War II era espionage film.

But this one has a pair of acting professionals who in their time managed to create entertainment out of less than this. J. Carrol Naish and John Carradine are a pair of Nazi spies and Naish does an incredibly stupid thing. He gets robbed of his code book while carrying it on his person at the same time Carradine is over from Berlin on a mission.

Unfortunately Carradine can't even find out what the mission is without the code book. So even after getting back with a couple of murders the mission whatever it was still can't get done. Carradine and Naish really loath each other and spend the entire film criticizing what each other did.

You have to credit these two. John Carradine with that lean and sinister countenance and that menacing voice and J. Carrol Naish that most chameleon of players who could blend into a role of any ethnic and racial type imaginable. Waterfront becomes a great exercise in watching a pair of the best professionals working to make a really laughable film somewhat entertaining.

This typical low-budget PRC Poverty Row feature with it's cheap sets was directed on the quick by Hungarian refugee director Steve Sekeley, born Istvan Szekely. As this film shows, he was not without talent. It is so cheaply made that PRC even cut down on the amount of fog used on the waterfront set. Most of the production budget must have gone to pay the two leads: John Carradine is, as to be expected, very good as his usual snarling self, but the best performance comes from that excellent character actor and dialectician, Irish-American J. Carol Naish, who as the Nazi ring leader sounds at times like Peter Lorre. (During the years this film was made, he was also the voice of the Italian Luigi on the long-time radio show Life with Luigi.) The rest of the cast is not very good. The romantic lead, Terry Frost, is wooden, particularly in a car scene shot against a background projection. One wonders what this now unknown director, who once made some decent films in Europe, might have done if he had the budget fellow Hungarian, Michael Curtiz, was given over at Warner Bros.

Dr. Carl Decker runs an optometrist shop on the San Francisco waterfront, but he also doubles as a Nazi spy for the Bay area. Decker is robbed of his code book, which also contains the names of all the enemy agents in the area. Decker and Marlow, another spy who just arrived in San Francisco to have his orders decoded by Decker, go off in search of the present owner of the book, who is also one of the Nazi spies operating on the west coast. Marlow, however, has a nasty streak to him, blackmailing the owner of a boarding house owner, Mrs. Hausner with impending threats to her family still living in Germany, and not being shy about using his gun when the situation arises. Marlow eventually shoots another Nazi collaborator Kramer, who is running out and Marlow believes will rat on him and Decker, and the crime is pinned on Jerry Donovan, the fiancé of Mrs. Hauser's daughter, Freda. Eventually Marlow has to prevent the Maxwell murder from coming back to him, while avoiding capture at the same time. Pretty good war time espionage flick with good performances from Carradine and Naish. The rest of the cast is standard for a PRC production. The climax of the film is really a drawback, lacking much excitement and seemingly rushed. Rating, 7.

A lot of murders are committed for the sake of a little black book. We all know who the murderer is, since he commits every murder in the focus of the camera lens. He is elegant and smart, he always makes a good performance and makes an interesting impression, he is an ornament to every film in which he takes part, although his roles are almost always nasty criminals - he was Heydrich in one of Douglas Sirk's first American films. But this film is very low budget, and you will mark it in almost every scene, it's about Nazi spies in San Francisco harbour and rivalry between them, resulting in a gradual collective massacre. The direction is good, the cinematography is all right in the constant darkness of the fog, and the actors do as well as they could under the circumstances. But the film is only watchable for John Carradine's elegantly eerie performance.

1944's "Waterfront" is a reasonable example of a Poverty Row spy picture, this one from PRC rather than Republic or Monogram. None could be considered classics of course, generally set in the US and inexpensively confined to just a few tiny sets. What makes these stand out at all isn't the script but the actors involved, in this case John Carradine and J. Carrol Naish, both undercover Nazi agents working the San Francisco waterfront. Naish's Dr. Carl Decker is an optometrist in possession of a code book that can decipher the secret instructions for Carradine's Victor Marlow, newly arrived and impatient to get started. The film opens with the code book being stolen, and by the time it's over all the bad guys are captured or dead (no one comes off very smart). Just a few months before the iconic PRC "Bluebeard," Carradine relishes his villainy, playing his final Nazi role, while Naish provides good support, as do Edwin Maxwell and John Bleifer, veteran performers all. Actress Maris Wrixon previously worked with Boris Karloff in both Warners' "British Intelligence" and Monogram's "The Ape," and reunited with Carradine in Monogram's "The Face of Marble."