Secret of Deep Harbor

SECRET OF DEEP HARBOR clearly suffers from low production values and cheapness. The script makes no sense, with the real killer and syndicate man smoking a bad egg in the beginning and never resurfacing; an apparently decent fellow, boat skipper, getting drunk and then beginning to try to kill people, with a pretty daughter who falls in love with a useless newspaper reporter.

Photography is very poor, action sequences are unbelievable, and direction uneven. Worst of all, pretty boy and leading actor Ron Foster can't act to save his life. No clear emotion comes out of his facial expressions, and he is not helped by portraying a character who seems to love a woman, then wants to blow town, then will do anything to get a story for the paper, and then gets side-tracked with drinking binges.

Real waste of time, but not of talent - no such thing as talent in this flick.

Someone has been smuggling wanted men out of the country, and the authorities think they're going through the waterfront. Ron Foster is the reporter or perhaps the stringer for that section of the city, and he wants out. He came thither originally so he could write a book, and now he's trapped. But he's found Merry Anders, and that makes it all worthwhile. Except that her father, Barry Kelley is the only charter boat captain around not going broke. Foster figures he's been carrying the Syndicate's people away. Except that the latest one has just turned up, shot and sunk with chains attached to an anchor from Kelley's boat.

It's a remake of I Cover the Waterfront, based on Max Miller's book. Given that it's a Robert E. Kent production, it's a cheap affair, and it shows mostly in the lack of atmosphere; the dive bars and living quarters are grime-free, except for the windows. As usual, Edward L. Cahn directs efficiently, and as usual in his last few years, when he was directing four or five movies a year, it's not very good.

Secret Of Deep Harbor finds Barry Kelley doing quite well in Southern California while his colleagues are barely getting by. There's a good reason for that, he's got a nice sideline smuggling gangsters across the Mexican border.

But one night Grant Richards who is in charge of the smuggling kills one of the gangsters. It's an ordered hit, the man was stealing from the syndicate. But with Kelley on board now a witness to a murder that sets in motion the whole plot of this film.

Really though I would think that Richards would not be wanting witnesses and that would be easy to arrange by killing him after he's in Mexico. But then we wouldn't have a story.

Which is that investigative reporter Ron Foster is on the waterfront looking for confirmation about gangster smuggling and he finds it after helping Merry Anders home with her drunken father Kelley. I don't need to draw you a blueprint to figure out the rest.

This is a remake of the famous Claudette Colbert classic I Cover The Waterfront and the original was so much better. This one was like a stock company from Peoria production of the original.

Watch the one with Colbert.