Captain Scarface

This is the kind of movie Humphrey Bogart could have starred in. You just have to think Leif Erickson (the Sam Wilton Character) = Humphrey. Here you have it all... exotic locale, beautiful damsel, Communist secret agents, the mystery ship.

Captain Scarface is really fun if you watch it while imagining what it would have been like with Bogie in it.

There are only so many movies that we, today, can hold up as the icons of the era of the 1940's to 1950's. You can't idolize them all, and for some reason, just about any movie with Bogie in it seems to suit peoples' subjective criterion of greatness. The golden age of black and white movies yielded a ton of dramas that kept people heading for the local movie theater. No, they weren't all classics, but who cares? I'd much rather watch Captain Scarface for the first time than Casablanca one more time again.

It's pretty obvious as you watch CAPTAIN SCARFACE that the film was made for a relatively small budget and starred lesser actors. It's also obvious that the "big name talent" for the film (Barton MacLane) was given a very weird and unconvincing role in the film. He plays Captain Scarface--a Russian maniac who sounded most of the time like he was doing a Bela Lugosi impersonation. While MacLane is a fine villain in films, he never really had a lot of range--this assignment was clearly outside his abilities. However, despite this as well as a rather abrupt ending to the movie, the film does work reasonably well--thanks to good writing.

The plot involves a duplicated merchant ship that replaced the real one once it was torpedoed. The plan is to sail this fake cargo ship into the Panama Canal and explode an atomic bomb on board. The baddies are all Russian Communists bent on harming America. However, what the Ruskies don't know is that an American (Leif Erickson) has replaced a Russian collaborator, as he is sure something is amiss with this strange boat. With Erickson's help, the few passengers aboard the ship learn that death awaits them and so they work together (mostly) to stop the attack.

This film is an interesting curio from the Red Scare and came out the same year Stalin died. Today, many might see the film and laugh at its seemingly paranoid and silly plot, but at the time this sort of film appealed to fears that Communism would engulf the globe. It gives us some insight into the people and the times. And, unlike some propaganda films of the era, this one is reasonably well done and quite interesting. Well written, aside from a very abrupt ending, it's worth a look.

By the way, you gotta love the way they chose names for this film. One of the guy's names is Perro ("dog") and the boat is called the El Baño (though it's missing proper accent mark) which means bathtub or bath. Pretty goofy.

Russian Barton MacLane (as Captain Scarface) is a Communist spy who plans to destroy the Panama Canal. Mr. MacLane enlists the help of German scientist Rudolph Anders (as Yeager) by threatening the life of his daughter, Virginia Grey (as Ilse Yeager). Meanwhile, American Leif Erickson (as Sam Wilton) has switched identities with a sailing associate of MacLane, after his Comrade (John Mylong) finds himself on the receiving end of a lead shower. Mr. Erickson is looking for quick passage to America, for reasons of his own. They are all aboard "Captain Scarface" MacLane's ship, the "Banos", according the dastardly captain, "…to be blown to eternity together!"

Not a bad story; but, it takes far too long to make sense. Howard Wendell and Isabel Randolph are most enjoyable, as passengers Fred and Kate Dilts; among other things, they help explain the opening explosion. "Captain Scarface" was, later, "General Peterson" on "I Dream of Jeannie".

A Communist plot to destroy the Panama canal sees a number of passengers join forces in an attempt to overthrow the crew of a ship carrying an atom bomb en route, while an eminent doctor aboard the ship is blackmailed into activating the missile or risk the murder of his daughter.

The dialogue is a bit juvenile, and MacLane seems to be hamming it up as the crooked captain, nicknamed "Scarface" for obvious reasons, who smokes a durry like the Penguin and will do anything to honour mother Russia. Erickson is the opportunist who stumbles upon the plot while attempting to escape South America for a relatively minor (by comparison) feud with a local kingpin. Grey is simply wasted, with little to do except wallow in her cabin aboard the doomed ship of "Captain Scarface".

The villains are simply described as 'Communists', political jingoism and highly appropriate for 1953, but the film is little more than a B-grade quickie, peddling an array of hokey plot contrivances for a 69 minute back-slapping exercise devoted to subduing a red threat. Hastily resolved, there's very little action of which to speak and despite attempts at intrigue, it's pretty dull an uninspired.

This is a good B-grade action feature that makes good use of an involved story of intrigue. It's an example of how low-budget, shabby looking sets can actually help the atmosphere if they go with the right story, and meanwhile the story itself moves at a decent pace as things gradually unfold.

Barton MacLane and Leif Erickson are the stars and antagonists. MacLane is "Captain Scarface", who is masterminding an evil and destructive scheme, while Erickson is a character designed as a Bogart-type antihero who finds himself in the right place and time to try to stop it. Erickson is solid in his role, while MacLane seems to relish his slightly outlandish character, making him interesting and menacing, if not always fully believable.

All of the action takes place either at a shabby-looking port-side hotel or on the captain's equally rundown-looking freighter. The no-frills look of both sets makes them believable and helps the atmosphere, since putting the characters in such settings implicitly makes them too seem rather small and tattered.

The story itself is easily interesting enough to hold your attention for the running time of slightly more than an hour. The actual plot of the bad guys comes across as somewhat far-fetched, but it is mostly a device to drive the intrigue. The story telling has a few rough edges, as can sometimes be the case with movies of this kind, but it has more than enough pluses to cancel these out. It's definitely worth seeing if you like movies of the genre.