Secret Command

US (1944): Spy

The film is based on a story The Saboteurs, taken from the Saturday Evening Post, by John and Ward Hawkins. Pat O'Brien is an undercover agent who is set up in his home town with a fake wife and children to join a shipyard and ferret out Nazi saboteurs. Complications ensue in that the foreman (Chester Morris) is his brother and he is holding a grudge against O'Brien for dropping out of the family's life for four years, not even responding to news of the death of their mother, and leaving his former girlfriend (Ruth Warrick) high and dry. Considering Morris hopes to marry Warrick if she can ever get O'Brien out of her heart, he has a vested interest in suspecting his brother of shady dealings. Carole Landis plays the fake wife and this is also complicated by the fact that she and O'Brien are falling for each other, despite their pact that the arrangement is "strictly business."

There are Nazis and sympathizers not only amongst the shipyard's crew but in higher up places, places we least suspect. All this material could have made a very gripping film but instead we get a routinely directed, acted and filmed potboiler and a pretty tame spy story at that. The hoot is that it got nominated for an Oscar for Special Effects, despite the fact that there are none in the film. This was during the early 1940s when every studio could name what it considered its best in the categories of Sound, Song, Original Score, Adapted Score and Special Effects and be guaranteed a nomination. In this case, the Academy was duped. The effect is that of giving an Art Direction nod to a film shot entirely in the desert or a Costume Design nod to a film set in a nudist colony. One of the best jokes ever perpetrated on the Academy. (There are some back projection shots but these hardly constitute special effects.) A. Edward Sutherland directs for Columbia. (Arne Andersen, IMDb)

 View a clip from this film from myspacetv.com.

1 nomination