7/10
Pop goes the Weasel
1 March 2010
Warning: Spoilers
**SPOILERS** Snappy little known film noir thriller involving amnesia victim US Navy man and former Japanese POW inmate Jim Fletcher, Bill Williams. It's Fletcher who's to stand trial for treason as soon as he's recovered enough to be released from the Naval Hospital he's a patient in.

Were kept in the dark to exactly what Fletcher did until he escapes from the hospital and gets in touch with is best friends Matt's, and fellow Japanese POW, wife Martha Gregory, Barbara Hale. It's through Martha that Fletcher expects to find out just what all the fuss is about him being a traitor to his country! It's then that we find out that it was Matt whom Fletcher was reported to have turned over to the Japanese for stealing food out of the POW camps mess hall! For that "herrndous" crime Matt was both tortured and executed by the Japs for not only theft but wanton disrespect for the mighty Japanese Empire and its God-like leader Emperor Hirohito!

Not for one moment believing, but just playing along with him, a word of what Fletcher says about him being innocent in her husbands death Martha is later convinced in that he's telling the truth when both her and Fletcher are almost run off the road, after he kidnapped her, by these two thugs who were tailing them. It's later when o the lamb when both Martha and Fletcher are dining in this L,A Chinese Restaurant, the White Lotus, that the truth comes out to what all this mystery of Fletcher being a traitor to his country is really all about! That's when the owner non other then Ken "the Weasel" Tokoyama, Richard Loo, dropped in to pick up the weekly receipts! It was the Weasel who was in charge of the Japanese prison camp that Fletcher and Matt were held in! Not only that it's the Weasel who can prove Fletcher's innocence by exposing the real traitor who ratted out Matt, in him raiding the camp mess hall, to his Japanese captors!

Had hitting thriller with the confused, due to his amnesia, Jim Fletcher on the run and at the same time trying to find out the truth to who set him up in being accused in turning in his best friend Matt Gregory to the Japanese who later had him executed! The only chance, besides the Weasel, that Fetcher has to prove his innocence is to contact his friend and former POW Ted Niles, Richard Quinn,in L.A who can prove that he was in fact a "Good Joe" who stuck by his fellow POWS through thick & thin. That's in Niles himself being together with both Fletcher and Matt in the Jap prison camp and knowing that he wouldn't under any circumstances, even the threat of death, turn over his friends, like Matt and himself, to the Japs to be tortured and executed!

***SPOILERS*** The film gets even more stranger when it comes out that the Weasel is now, four years after the war, working with the L.A mob in a plan to get their hands on some 100 million dollars of US counterfeit currency that was stashed, before the attack on Pearl Harbr, in a secret safe house by the Japanese Government to be used to undermine the US economy when the war broke out! Heart-stopping final as Fletcher now held hostage by the Weasel and one of his accomplices fights for his life in preventing the Weasel & Co. from throwing him off a speeding train that he was tricked into boarding!
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