Murder in the Air

Murder In The Air marked the conclusion of future president Ronald Reagan as two fisted, hard hitting Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft with Eddie Foy, Jr. as his sidekick. It's got every ingredient a B film for the Saturday matinée crowd should have, spies with tattoos, a secret weapon, and a two timing double crossing dame who nearly ends it for our hero.

Although the spies are never outrightly identified as German, the head guy talks with a Teutonic accent, all the bad guys have German sounding names, and they all have the same tattoo on the arm. When a body turns up Philadelphia with a lot of cash and a letter in invisible ink to a guy the US government has been looking to nail for espionage, Ron is sent in undercover taking the dead guy's identity.

These spies have something big in mind, to steal the plans of a secret weapon, a ray that can paralyze electrical currents. The weapon is called the Inertia Projector and its years in advance before the term laser came into general use.

The femme fatale in the plot is Lya Lys who is best remembered for being robbed of all her blood in The Return Of Doctor X by Humphrey Bogart. She's the wife of the dead guy Reagan is masquerading as and she nearly cooks Reagan's act. Good thing Ron was thinking fast on his feet here.

The film was written around some real footage of the USS Macon dirigible crash and incorporated in Murder In The Air. It's the best thing about the movie, the way Warner Brothers skilfully edited the disaster film footage into this movie.

My big question is how come the ray wasn't used the following year at Pearl Harbor against the Japanese?