This Pine-Thomas film from Paramount's B picture unit has not stood the test of time all that well. It's a World War II flag waver that casts Richard Arlen as a resident alien who gets tempted by the Nazis to work for them. They need his special skills as a radio man to help operate a prototype short wave system that is signaling a Japanese submarine the whereabouts of cargo ships to sink.
For dramatic purposes the film doesn't have Arlen working all along undercover. Instead he and other radio people are summarily fired at the direction of the FBI with the hope that the Nazis would contact him as he was both available and disillusioned with America. Female agent Wendy Barrie keeps Arlen under surveillance at all times and of course the inevitable romance ensues.
In a gimmick more suitable to one of Sam Katzman's Monogram extravaganzas, both Arlen and Barrie are captured by the Nazis and locked in a room that fills with poison gas. The slowest acting poison gas in the history of film. Arlen comes up with an idea and sends a signal with radio equipment that some junior G-Man kid picks up and the spies are rounded up and Arlen and Barrie are saved.
It was eerily prescient about poison gas and the Nazis. But if this was the stuff they used at Auschwitz, a couple million people would have survived. Also Nazis and Japanese work a lot more coordinated than they ever did in the real war.
I'm sure the cast must have looked back with a shudder at Submarine Alert.
For dramatic purposes the film doesn't have Arlen working all along undercover. Instead he and other radio people are summarily fired at the direction of the FBI with the hope that the Nazis would contact him as he was both available and disillusioned with America. Female agent Wendy Barrie keeps Arlen under surveillance at all times and of course the inevitable romance ensues.
In a gimmick more suitable to one of Sam Katzman's Monogram extravaganzas, both Arlen and Barrie are captured by the Nazis and locked in a room that fills with poison gas. The slowest acting poison gas in the history of film. Arlen comes up with an idea and sends a signal with radio equipment that some junior G-Man kid picks up and the spies are rounded up and Arlen and Barrie are saved.
It was eerily prescient about poison gas and the Nazis. But if this was the stuff they used at Auschwitz, a couple million people would have survived. Also Nazis and Japanese work a lot more coordinated than they ever did in the real war.
I'm sure the cast must have looked back with a shudder at Submarine Alert.