Postal Inspector

Postal Inspector (1936)

*** (out of 4)

A city is being ravished by a flood when a group of criminals (including Bela Lugosi) decide to steal three million from the post office, which gets the postal inspector (Richard Cortez) involved. I was really shocked to see how much I liked this little film that has some wonderful comic moments dealing with various ways people get ripped off and the ending was full of great action. The special effects of the city being ripped apart by water were all very well done, although some stock footage was used. An interesting note was that this was Lugosi's final film for Universal under his Dracula contract.

This film stars Ricardo Cortez as the title character investigating various mail fraud schemes, and, ultimately, the theft of 3 million bucks earmarked for destruction. Patricia Ellis plays a nightclub singer who falls for Cortez' brother. Bela Lugosi plays the nightclub owner who pulls the heist.

The second half of the film takes place during a flood, with Cortez promising everyone the mail will still get through, by train, plane, or boat if necessary. Right. I can't even get my store circulars delivered on time during a sunny day.

Cortez is better than usual, and Ellis is very attractive. She sings a few songs which are not memorable, including this ditty aboard a plane flying through dense fog while her maid (Hattie McDaniel) bugs her eyes out a la Mantan Moreland: "Here we are together flying high, We're up in heaven, you and I, We'll be coming down to earth someday, But in the meantime, let's be gay."

Well, I guess if you think you're about to crash, it's a good time to experiment with your orientation.

Before seeing this the only other film I ever saw dealing with the Post Office police was a very good Alan Ladd noir film called Appointment With Danger where Ladd like Ricardo Cortez here plays a Post Office cop. Postal Inspector does not have the really good plot the Ladd film has but it's good enough and it has some nice action sequences involving a flood that spoils plans for the good guys and bad guys alike.

Bela Lugosi plays a nightclub owner who doubles as the boss of a gang and he's got a pretty good scheme involving the robbery of a shipment of old and soon to be retired currency being shipped by mail. He carries it off, but the flash flood interrupts his plans.

Patricia Ellis plays a nightclub singer and Michael Loring, Cortez's brother who get innocently into a jackpot in the robbery as he's suspected of being an inside man.

Postal Inspector has a nice action climax involving a chase with outboard motorboats through flooded. And in the role of the nightclub racketeer owner provided a nice change of pace for Bela Lugosi not playing a mad scientist or an inhuman fiend.

The British Board of Film Certifiers banned Universal's THE RAVEN as "overly brutal and sadistic" and gave THE INVISIBLE RAY an A (for Adults Only) Certificate. This pretty much ended the genre that we now call Universal's "Golden Age". So where did this leave its top terror stars, Boris and Bela? For awhile, nowhere! Boris ended up playing a kindly old grandfather type in NIGHT KEY (1937) and Bela ended up in the musical comedy/drama playing a Mexican nightclub owner! Ricardo Cortez (whose real name was Jack Kranz) plays the title role and much of the movies 58 minute running time shows him dealing with people who have been the victims of mail fraud. This provides a lot of intentional humour. Cortez's brother is a Treasury officer in charge of getting worn out bills back to Washington. The girl he is in love with sings in Lugosi's nightclub and lets slip a casual comment that $3 million in old bills will soon go out of the local bank. Bela is in debt to a gagnster and decides to steal the shipment. As if that were not bad enough the town is threatened by a flood! Republic would take that plot and stretch it out for a 12 chapter serial so believe me this film will be long on action. Bela played a similar character in the 1930 film WILD COMPANY. He is not menacing at all until the last 10 minutes of the film when he becomes a crook. Ricardo Cortez had worked with D.W. Griffith (THE SORROWS OF SATAN, 1926) and had been the first actor to play Sam Spade (THE MALTESE FALCON, 1931). Watch the supporting cast for Guy Usher, who would face Lugosi on less equal terms in THE DEVIL BAT (1942) and Hattie McDaniel who had already costarred with Bela in MURDER BY TELEVISION (1935) and would go on to appear in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). The terror genre would start up again within 3 years but the old days were gone for good. This is still a fun film to watch even if it is just to see Bela in a relatively normal character role.

This was Bela Lugosi's last film on his first contract with Universal. As such, it is not too bad. The Actman-Loesser songs are silly but certainly not hard to listen to. There is evidence of some post-production editing on this one - it barely clocks in at an hour. The familiar background score by Clifford Vaughan was reused many times by Universal as stock music for the next 7 years. Worth looking at once if only to see Bela !