Pun Salad

[IMDB Rating: 7.3]

A 1942 American movie from Alfred Hitchcock, starring Robert Cummings as the hero.

Cummings plays Barry Kane, a worker at a Southern California aviation plant, obviously vital to the war effort. A disastrous fire starts and Barry's buddy is killed while bravely trying to get it under control. Guess what? It's sabotage! And Barry finds himself being railroaded as the culprit, as the fire extinguisher he handed his friend had been fiendishly filled with gasoline.

It turns out the actual bad guy was Frye, the guy that handed Barry the extinguisher just before. But Barry's the only person who knows this, and he can't get the authorities to believe him. So he slips out of the noose, and goes in search of Frye. Before long, he's in over his head, uncovering a rats' nest of Nazi spies and killers. Along the way he picks up a love interest, Pat; she's initially suspicious, but eventually gets swept up in the cross-country intrigue as well.

Quibbles: the movie drags in spots, and suffers from some big "why didn't the bad guys just…" credibility problems. And I'm more used to Bob Cummings being the star of 50s/60s TV sitcoms, where he played a fast-talking smooth playboy type. Seeing him as an action hero is a little discordant.

But overall, my interest was held, and the ending is classic. (Don't watch the trailer, though, because they give it away.)