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.

... basically a wasted hour. Honestly, I enjoy the oldies, but this story was just a little ado about nothing. Don't know what the other reviewers saw in it. Weak lines, corny acting, ridiculous premise... I could go on but it's not worth it.

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.

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.

If you don't pay attention too closely, this is a fairly entertaining film. J. Carrol Naish is fine as the Nazi spymaster. John Carradine just wasn't sinister or psychotic enough to make his character believable, but was better than most of the rest of the cast, though John Bleifer stood out as the slimy, double-dealing blackmailer. I thought it was pretty well directed, too.

I can see why the police arrested the male romantic lead, but if the FBI had really done their job he would have been quickly released, since he had no gun and none was recovered at the scene, had no gunfire residue on his hands (The paraffin test had been mentioned in movies of the 1930s.), and had a legitimate reason for being at the murder scene. Yet he went to trial for the murder. I don't know much about guns, but I recognized the iconic Luger pistol used by the murderer. The FBI identified the murder weapon as a Mauser. A pretty clumsy portrayal of the FBI for this marginally propagandistic spy drama.

I watched a copy downloaded from The Internet Archive. The print from which the file was made had seen better days.