Michael O'Keefe Dr. Karl Decker(J. Carrol Naish)is a well known and respected optometrist with an office on a San Francisco waterfront. It is not common knowledge that he is a front man for a cell of the Third Reich. A henchman named Marlow(John Carradine)is to arrive from Germany and collect a code book full of top-secret information; but Decker is mugged and is robbed of the little black book. An upset Marlow makes the rounds visiting possible German Americans, who may have the book. It is not above him to use terror tactics on those with relatives in concentration camps. The cast also includes: Maris Wixon, Edwin Maxwell, John Bleifer, and Olga Fabian.

Bill Barstad If you don't pay attention too closely, this is a fairly entertaining film. J. Carrol Naish is fine as the Nazi spymaster. John Carradine just wasn't sinister or psychotic enough to make his character believable, but was better than most of the rest of the cast, though John Bleifer stood out as the slimy, double-dealing blackmailer. I thought it was pretty well directed, too.I can see why the police arrested the male romantic lead, but if the FBI had really done their job he would have been quickly released, since he had no gun and none was recovered at the scene, had no gunfire residue on his hands (The paraffin test had been mentioned in movies of the 1930s.), and had a legitimate reason for being at the murder scene. Yet he went to trial for the murder. I don't know much about guns, but I recognized the iconic Luger pistol used by the murderer. The FBI identified the murder weapon as a Mauser. A pretty clumsy portrayal of the FBI for this marginally propagandistic spy drama.I watched a copy downloaded from The Internet Archive. The print from which the file was made had seen better days.

Charles Delacroix I just saw this movie and thought, on the whole, that this is a worthwhile WWII spy flick.John Carradine provided a very good, very chilling performance as the lead "bad guy". Other performances were sound. The script seemed to me to be fairly solid as well. The general flavor of foggy, drippy, SF waterfront "trouble" was effective and appealing.This was produced in 1944 when, of course, domestic spying was a real concern, and ethnic heritage in an Axis nation could sometimes excite not always fair concerns about loyalty. All the more impressive, then, is the sympathetic depiction of a German-American family.All in all a film worth seeing if you like WWII-era flicks about the war and espionage.

Mike-764 Dr. Carl Decker runs an optometrist shop on the San Francisco waterfront, but he also doubles as a Nazi spy for the Bay area. Decker is robbed of his code book, which also contains the names of all the enemy agents in the area. Decker and Marlow, another spy who just arrived in San Francisco to have his orders decoded by Decker, go off in search of the present owner of the book, who is also one of the Nazi spies operating on the west coast. Marlow, however, has a nasty streak to him, blackmailing the owner of a boarding house owner, Mrs. Hausner with impending threats to her family still living in Germany, and not being shy about using his gun when the situation arises. Marlow eventually shoots another Nazi collaborator Kramer, who is running out and Marlow believes will rat on him and Decker, and the crime is pinned on Jerry Donovan, the fiancé of Mrs. Hauser's daughter, Freda. Eventually Marlow has to prevent the Maxwell murder from coming back to him, while avoiding capture at the same time. Pretty good war time espionage flick with good performances from Carradine and Naish. The rest of the cast is standard for a PRC production. The climax of the film is really a drawback, lacking much excitement and seemingly rushed. Rating, 7.