646f9e108c Matt Corbin, a vacationing magazine writer, takes a fishing trip to Minnesota, and stumbles across a lake in which all the fish have mysteriously died. The locals are tight-lipped about it, but Corbin learns that a group of former-Nazis-turned-Communists have purchased a lodge on an island in the middle of the fish-killing lake, and have built some kind of laboratory. Never one to pass up a chance to sell a story to a magazine, Matt decides to investigate. His only ally is Janet Keller, the sister of the local doctor who has been caught up in whatever those nefarious Commie-Nazis are up to. What they are up to, with Soviet financing, is the development of diseases to use in bacteriological warfare against the United States, starting right there in Minnesota. A reporter on a fishing vacation stumbles into a town where all the local fish have mysteriously died and the population is either too afraid to talk or is downright hostile. After some digging, the reporter discovers that a secretive group of men has bought a local lodge and apparently turned it into some kind of mysterious scientific laboratory. The reporter and the sister of the local doctor set out to discover exactly what is going on up there. Matt Corbin (Elliott Reid) is a magazine writer on a fishing trip in Winnoga, Minnesota. He discovers all the fish in the town's lake are dead and the locals are none too friendly. He starts nosing around and finds himself in the middle of a Communist plot to overthrow America with germ warfare. The original story for this had Nazis as the villains instead of Communists. But producer Howard Hughes felt Reds were more timely so the story was changed to Communists who used to be Nazis. Which is all kinds of hilarious if you think about it.<br/><br/>Elliott Reid, a fine character actor I've seen in tons of stuff, is an atypical lead but does a solid job. His big romantic scene is a pretty big fail, though. Frank Darien is fun as the elderly general store owner who tries to help Reid. Carla Balenda, no doubt given the female lead by Hughes, offers a bland and forgettable turn here. I don't think she changed facial expressions more than twice. Raymond Burr plays one of the Commies. He's the most famous actor in the movie. The rest of the cast is made up of lesser-known but quality actors, some of which classic movie fans might recognize (Lurene Tuttle, for one). Perhaps the most pleasant surprise about this movie is that it's directed by William Cameron Menzies, legendary production designer whose directorial efforts include Things to Come and Invaders from Mars. Menzies gives this movie a stylish direction lacking in most other '50s Red Scare flicks. The movie looks like a film noir, not a political thriller. It's a beautiful-looking black & white movie. Whether you take the story seriously or not, I don't see how you can deny it's a well-crafted film of its type. It's a reasonably suspenseful thriller with some style and some neat creepy moments late in the film. I was 12 years old when I first learned of this film from reading John Baxters chapter on William Cameron Menzies in his ground breaking book "Science Fiction in The Cinema.' The plot concerning germ warfare and Baxters praise of the film made me want to see it. I later learned from other sources that this film was made from a finished film called THE MAN HE FOUND, about Adolph Hitler being alive and well and living the USA. RKO studio heads did not like the film and ordered a new story written and new footage shot that would use as much footage from THE MAN HE FOUND as possible. This made me want to see it even more. But for years this film eluded me. It never showed up on TV, never shown as part of a Menzies retrospective and never turned up officially on video. It then turned up in the early 1990's late one night on TNT, where I taped it and have watched several times since. <br/><br/> While I found the film of some interest, I can certainly say Baxter over praised this film. Its not a bad cold war era espionage thriller, but other than the plot, its nothing special either. It is no doubt the least interesting of Menzies fantastic films that he both designed and directed. The court yard where infected guinea pigs wander around like zombies and Otto Waldis's lab are of some visual interest, but over all there isn't much of Menzies design genius evident. To comment on his direction is pointless, because Menzies was never a good director of actors. The reshooting and incorporating old scenes with the new scenes is done fairly well. I noticed where new scenes were inserted, but only because I was looking for them. Note that this film uses a lot of close ups. Otto Waldis as the former Nazi scientist, now working for Russian Communists is a bit hard to take. He praises his new adopted ideology. While its true Nazism and Communism have more in common then with western style democracy, most of the Nazi scientists who went to work for the Commies after the war did so more out of pragmatic and mercenary reasons than ideological ones.
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291 weeks ago