Murder in the Air

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.

SYNOPSIS: Ronald Reagan, G-Men, Espionage, Airplanes....that about sums it up.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: American Government = Good / Foreigners = Bad. An entertaining propaganda film for its day. Supposedly, the 3rd in a series of G-Men pictures that Ronald Regan stared in. His character is named Brass Bancroft (Hollywood just doesn't use names like this anymore). Written and filmed during a time when the U.S. Government was never questioned and Communism was considered a mental plague and not a political view. It is easy to tell who the good guys are and you know the bad guys will be defeated in the end.

PROS AND CONS: I have a soft spot for the old days. Back in the day when even second rate B-Movies had some art and talent to them. These films reflected the audience that they were marketed toward which was middle class white Americans before World War II. The concept of ethnicity hadn't yet come to light, segregation was the norm. The government was a benevolent autocratic entity that could do no wrong. The film centers around science aviation and espionage, which back in the day was about as gee-wiz as you could get. There are shades of the Movie-Serials of the 40s as well as the coming paranoia of the communist conspiracy. If you want to see the roots of Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films, see pictures such as this.

One of the first things that was evident is that this film was produced on the studio lot. There is no location shooting and everything is shot on sound stage sets. What gives this away is the the lack of any ceiling on the interior shots and the shadows cast by the lighting. This gives the illusion that each room has 20 foot high ceilings that go up forever. This is pretty basic entertainment, meant to satisfy a pretty simple audience that didn't question much. Now, it is almost more entertaining for its simplicity and gullibility than anything else....and of course that the lead actor becomes president of the United States.

Murder in the Air has a really interesting start: a dead homeless man has fifty thousand dollars on his person and a mysterious tattoo on his arm. Remember, in 1940, nobody but sailors had tattoos! After doing a little digging, reporters Ronald Reagan and Eddie Foy Jr. Find out that the tattoo is a symbol for enemy agents. They go undercover to find the ringleader; but since this is a B-picture, don't expect anything wonderful. It's an entertaining flick for a double feature back in the day, when you'd pay one ticket price and watch a cartoon, newsreel, and two films.

As Ronnie impersonates the dead man and follows his orders to California, he has to pretend he's a bad guy and as tough as it gets. He also has to hope that no one remembers who the dead man really was - things get sticky when the widow shows up! Again, don't expect too much from it, since there isn't any part of it that's A-tier quality. There are over-the-top jokes, subpar acting, and a pretty straight-forward plot. But if you like spy movies and want something on in the background while you're folding the laundry, you won't need to turn this one off.

President Ronald Reagan has been accused of being a second rate actor, mostly due to his appearance in BEDTIME FOR BONZO. However he actually appeared (albeit in many supporting roles) in respectable, even good films. Early in his career he was earmarked for some type of stardom by the "Brass Bancroft" films.

I have never seen any of these "Brass Bancroft" Secret Agent films made by Reagan in the late 1930s, but this one has always intrigued me. Supposedly the destruction of the Naval Airship Mason is actually based on some footage of the destruction (in 1935) of the last Naval Zeppelin "U.S.S. Macon" which was lost in the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur. I'm not expecting anything along the lines of the film of the Hindenburg Crash, or of the Challenger explosion, but it would be curious to see it.

The fourth in the "Brass Bancroft" series is the best. Once again, RONALD REAGAN plays the confident government man whose job it is to expose spies led by JAMES STEPHENSON, the accented villain. It has the flavor of an extended Saturday afternoon serial, the kind that movie fans came to expect as a steady diet during the '30s and '40s.

All the ingredients for such an adventurous tale are here--a mysterious man with a tattoo on his arm; a ring of spies; good guys putting themselves into dangerous positions by posing as gangsters; and the inevitable conclusion with the spies efficiently disposed of by U.S. agents on their trail.

And once again, one gets the impression that Ronald Reagan was indeed being groomed for stardom as an Errol Flynn type of action star in his early days. He once described himself as the "Errol Flynn of the B-films" and it's an apt description.

Simplistic spy story made a year before Pearl Harbor, has its best moments when it uses actual footage from a dirigible disaster at sea with the footage blended evenly with studio scenes aboard the dirigible before it crashes. It's the last twenty minutes or so that makes the whole thing worth watching.

Fortunately for Reagan, it wasn't long after this one that the studio began putting him in A-films where he eventually earned his leading man status and became a dependable fixture throughout the forties.