Desenmascarados

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.

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 (1940)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Fourth and final film in Warner's Brass Bancroft series with Ronald Reagan in the lead. This time out enemy agents are destroying various sites and now they have their eyes on destroying the entire country. Reagan goes undercover and gets inside the gang to try and stop them before more damage is done. This is probably the second best in the series (behind the third film) and fans of "B" movies will certainly have enough here to keep them entertained. The film, running just 55-minutes, makes for some nice entertainment because it throws pretty much everything in except for the kitchen sink but then again that might have ended up on the cutting room floor. The entire movie goes at a very fast pace and it leads up to a very good ending set on a Dirigible, which of course has to crash into the ocean. I wish this sequence would have gone on longer but what's here is nice. Reagan is very comfortable in the role and manages to turn in his best performance of the series. His tough act is a lot more believable here than in the previous three films and Eddie Foy, Jr. is back for comic relief. John Litel and James Stephenson co-star.

SYNOPSIS: Ronald Reagan, G-Men, Espionage, Airplanes....that about sums it up.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER: American Government = Good / Foreigners = Bad. An entertaining propaganda film for its day. Supposedly, the 3rd in a series of G-Men pictures that Ronald Regan stared in. His character is named Brass Bancroft (Hollywood just doesn't use names like this anymore). Written and filmed during a time when the U.S. Government was never questioned and Communism was considered a mental plague and not a political view. It is easy to tell who the good guys are and you know the bad guys will be defeated in the end.

PROS AND CONS: I have a soft spot for the old days. Back in the day when even second rate B-Movies had some art and talent to them. These films reflected the audience that they were marketed toward which was middle class white Americans before World War II. The concept of ethnicity hadn't yet come to light, segregation was the norm. The government was a benevolent autocratic entity that could do no wrong. The film centers around science aviation and espionage, which back in the day was about as gee-wiz as you could get. There are shades of the Movie-Serials of the 40s as well as the coming paranoia of the communist conspiracy. If you want to see the roots of Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films, see pictures such as this.

One of the first things that was evident is that this film was produced on the studio lot. There is no location shooting and everything is shot on sound stage sets. What gives this away is the the lack of any ceiling on the interior shots and the shadows cast by the lighting. This gives the illusion that each room has 20 foot high ceilings that go up forever. This is pretty basic entertainment, meant to satisfy a pretty simple audience that didn't question much. Now, it is almost more entertaining for its simplicity and gullibility than anything else....and of course that the lead actor becomes president of the United States.

President Ronald Reagan has been accused of being a second rate actor, mostly due to his appearance in BEDTIME FOR BONZO. However he actually appeared (albeit in many supporting roles) in respectable, even good films. Early in his career he was earmarked for some type of stardom by the "Brass Bancroft" films.

I have never seen any of these "Brass Bancroft" Secret Agent films made by Reagan in the late 1930s, but this one has always intrigued me. Supposedly the destruction of the Naval Airship Mason is actually based on some footage of the destruction (in 1935) of the last Naval Zeppelin "U.S.S. Macon" which was lost in the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur. I'm not expecting anything along the lines of the film of the Hindenburg Crash, or of the Challenger explosion, but it would be curious to see it.