Thursday, December 27, 2018

Panama Patrol (1939)

Major Waring (Leon Ames) is just about to marry his secretary Helen Lane (Charlotte Wynters) when he gets the call to translate a coded message that has just been received, well duty calls! After a brief interlude to arrest a suspicious East Asian and suspected spy (who promptly gets shot by enemy unknown) the code is broken.

Waring heads to New York masquerading as the shot spy and begins to uncover a plot by Chinese spies to damage the Panama Canal. However is one of his own men, Arlie Johnson (Abner Biberman) in on the plot? Why indeed and Waring ends up getting captured by the spies, who luckily are pretty useless...

Much of the plot doesn't make sense and there is plenty of Yellow Peril nonsense but it is an exciting and fast paced movie with plenty of action and some neat code breaking. The soundtrack though is weird, no attempt at all seems to have been made to match the music to the actual action.