Supmarine Alert (1943) - Video On Demand

Supmarine Alert - Movie Review

Nazi spies use a stolen shortwave transmitter prototype to broadcast top secret shipping info to an offshore Japanese sub. To nab the spy ring, the Government has the West Coast's top radio engineers fired and shadowed to see if the Nazis recruit them to complete work on the prototype radio.

The plot of the Pine-Thomas adventure quickie Submarine Alert is more than a little beholden to Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. Richard Arlen plays FBI radio engineer Lee Deerhold, a resident alien, who turns bitter and vindictive when he is abruptly fired. He desperatly needs job to pay for his adorable little ward Gina's life-saving operation. Actually, his termination was engineered by his FBI superiors, so that Deerhold will be susceptible to a job offer from a gang of Nazi saboteurs. When Deerhold finally gets wise to what's going on, he finds himself being hotly pursued by practically everyone else in the picture and is swept up in a maelstrom of deceit and danger.

It has all the action of a good serial, crammed into a brief 66 minutes: a car chase that ends in a train tunnel, disguises and mistaken identities, bad miniatures, kidnappings and one of those elaborate attempted murders involving slow, painful death in a locked room (you know, the kind that seems to guarantee an escape). Arlen is charismatic as the wronged man, and Barrie, in her last film before a short TV career, is both beautiful and charming. The treatment of the Axis powers is interesting: neither the Japanese commander (Abner Biberman) nor the Nazi ringleader (Nils Asther) is particularly slimy or evil; in fact, the American government comes across as the most unforgiving, having put Arlen and dozens of others out of their jobs.

The better-than-average cast includes Wendy Barrie as undercover agent Ann Patterson, Nils Asther as a mysterious doctor, and Abner Biberman, Marc Lawrence and Dwight Frye as various villains.

Supmarine Alert - Cast & Crew

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