Submarine Alert (1943)

Unka Woo, don't forget to kiss her!

A brace of Nazis arrive at a secluded rural shack. "Ve haf come for ze transmitter, Mr. Bergstrom." Bergstrom ain't selling and he ain't giving it away, either. In fact, he's running away. Not, unfortunately for him, fast enough to outpace a bullet. The Huns shoot, Bergstrom falls and is presumably ground to gruel as a tractor/tiller runs over his body. Fortunately for the plot ze transmitter is unharmed, and the Huns steal it.
Soon enough the spy bad guys are using ze transmitter to contact the submerged bad guys. Axis submarines off the American coast are alerted when American cargo ships are departing, and vital oil tankers begin sinking at an alarming rate.
And so the premise of SUBMARINE ALERT. It stars the mediocre Richard Arlen as Lew Deerhold, an electronic engineer who is recruited by the Nazis to work on ze Bergstrom transmitter. The FBI has orchestrated his firing to put him on the street, as it were, and Deerhold isn't aware those throwing all that money at him are agents of the enemy. The female lead is played by Wendy Barrie, whose trivia entries at imdb.com are much more intriguing than her on screen performance or credit list. Barrie's godfather was, we are told, the author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie. Pan's Wendy was named after Miss Barrie. Another interesting snippet - Barrie was once engaged to the gangster "Bugsy" Siegel. Barrie plays undercover FBI agent Ann Patterson, who is assigned to Deerhold. The two leads don't necessarily strike sparks in their scenes together, but they seem to be hitting their marks and delivering their lines competently enough.
The 3-stars I gave to SUBMARINE ALERT is for fans of the sub-sub-genre Action-War-War Bond Rally movies. In other words, if you like movies that deal with war and that were churned out quickly during a war, in this case World War II, SUBMARINE ALERT will satisfy your craving. Just barely, but it'll do. You can tell this is a War Bond Rally movie because it contains a final scene with one of the leads giving a testimonial to all that is good about America and why we have to defeat the enemy at any cost.
Even fans of the genre will be annoyed by the most cloyingly cute child actress I've ever seen. Fortunately, the only reason she's in the movie is to require an expensive operation. The film trots her off to a hospital before the bad taste has a chance to set in your mouth. In other words, she gives the Arlen character an altruistic reason to need money NOW and explains his willingness to ask too few questions when approached by the disguised Germans. More annoying are some closing scenes of airplanes chasing a submarine. They must not have had any stock footage of subs or planes because this is the most pathetically obvious use of cheap models I've seen this side of Ed Woods. Finally, some scenes reveal a seriously scratched and deteriorated master print. July 1, 2004

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