Murder in the Air

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.

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.

Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft (Ronald Reagan) goes undercover to infiltrate a saboteur ring that is after an experimental energy weapon (the "inertia projector") that is about to be tested onboard a giant Navy dirigible. The slim story resembles a forties serial without the numerous cliff-hangers as the Bancroft almost single-handedly defeats nefarious spies led by Garvey (James Stephenson) and Rumford (Victor Zimmerman) through a series of fights, chases and daring-do. Reagan is pretty good as the incredibly lanky Bancroft but his sidekick 'Gabby' (Eddie Foy) who, with his put-upon fiancée Dolly (Helen Lynd), provides some dated comic-relief, get tiresome quickly. The pre-war film is a bit jingoistic but seems more concerned with socialists than with Nazis or the Japanese - at one point Bancroft is roughed-up and 'arrested' after being accused of being a 'wobbly' (a member of 'The Industrial Workers of the World'). The film moves through its brief running time briskly and despite some ludicrous touches (the clandestine saboteurs sport very obvious tattoos that everyone seems to recognise), the story is entertaining and the special effects, such as the downing of the huge dirigible quite well done (for budget and genre). The low-budget, somewhat misleadingly titled thriller may be best known for a plot involving a theoretical energy weapon that (in the hands of the USA) would bring about world peace and starring future President Reagan, who (four decades later) would endorse SDI 'Star Wars', an initiative involving theoretical energy weapons that (in the hands of the USA) would bring about world peace.

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.

You can't expect a lot from B movie series that were made to fill Saturday afternoons until it was time to show the A pic again. Which is good, because there isn't much here.

Except for a bizarre piece of science fiction called the Inertia Projector, that looks as if it were lifted directly from another Saturday afternoon serial, the Flash Gordon series. This thing shoots a light ray that is supposed to paralyze any sort of mechanical contraption. When it appears in the otherwise very realistic movie, it really seems to come from out - way out - in left field.

Others have joked about this being a precursor to the wacky Star Wars defense system that was proposed during the Reagan administration.

What I found more interesting is that this movie played into the real fear of enemy sabotage in this country a full year before Pearl Harbor.

There's no point in examining this movie too closely. Such movies were produced quickly and not designed to withstand close scrutiny. It was very much a product of its time, and while certainly not a great example of movie-making, decently done for what it was.