Let's Get Tough has those irrepressible East Side Kids getting involved with hunting down an Axis Spy Ring operating in of all places the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Back in those days the Axis would pop up just about everywhere including in the Ozarks in another fabulous Monogram propaganda effort, Joan Of Ozark.
Tom Brown who is Bobby Jordan's older brother has been dishonorably discharged, but that's all a put up job because he's infiltrated the spy ring. The spy ring is an ecumenical consisting mostly of Japanese headed by Philip Ahn, but also including Gabriel Dell in a German accent that he learned in the Borscht Belt and of course the infiltrator Brown.
The East Side Kids in their burst of Pearl Harbor inspired patriotism first mess up a Chinese owned business and later have to apologize for it especially since some idiot Japanese thought he was one of them and kill him when he doesn't join the spy ring. Sad to say we've had incidents just like that after the Gulf War and the current Afghan and Iraqi Wars. Gangs of kids imbued with patriotism going after Moslem owned businesses and Moslem people. Here these kids are only wrong because they made a mistake. And of course the Orientals not be able to tell one group from another is positively ludicrous.
Robert Armstrong as your neighborhood Irish cop and Florence Rice as his daughter who is going out with Brown all add to the general daffiness of this wartime propaganda film that could only have been made during our World War II years.
In addition the film was badly edited so you have to fill in a few blanks for the story to make any sense. I doubt we'll ever see a director's cut of Let's Get Tough.
