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Bad Movie of the Week

Number 145 of a series

YouTube is becoming the go-to place for classic movies. For “classic” read “old.” This one came out in 1938 from Fine Arts Pictures.

It’s Cipher Bureau, and it is going to be about spies and code breaking. Wikipedia has zero synopsis, but there is a list of credits.

You will notice Jason Robards in the credits, the only name I recognize.

There are going to be spies and some dirty business. The opening scene shows three very tough men riding in a car in the dark of night. We know there is going to be trouble.

But it is not what you think These are from the Cipher Bureau, and they have come to take down a spy ring. And my first thought is this is a job for the FBI or the Secret Service. Not some code breakers working out of a Washington office.

Anyhow, they muff the job. One of the spooks triggers a smoke dispenser, and the spies make their getaway.

Back at the office boss man Phillip Waring does what bosses did prior to the war. He orders his lady secretary Helen Lane to get some more coffee. That’s what women office workers did in those days.

Phillip’s brother Paul drops by. He is a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy. He’s going to play a part.

Phillip has Paul set up a radio direction finder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They are going to triangulate the spies’ radio transmissions and locate the transmitter.

Again no. You do not set up a direction finder inside a building. It’s only going to show the signal is coming from the window.

They decide the spies are after plans for modifications to the world famous French 75mm field artillery gun. They figure the spies will make an attempt to steal the plans while they are being transported. They feed Paul with a phony set of plans and send the real plans by another route.

Paul is on the train with the plans, and he meets glamorous Therese Brahm. Of course he falls for her. Of course she is a spy.

But that is not how the spies get the plans. Somebody spikes Paul’s drink, and he arrives passed out drunk at his destination. The plans are gone. Paul is arrested. Poor Paul. He has yet to be brought in on the ruse.

Theresa arrives at the spy center, where master pianist Simon Herrick is tutoring a young girl. Music is going to play in the code scheme.

The code breakers do it again. They track the spies to another hideout, and again the bad guys get the drop and escape.

But they do recover some code stuff, and we see cryptography as it existed before computers. It’s a transposition cipher, and they crack it.

Meanwhile a board of inquiry strips Paul of his rank and boots him out of the Navy.

But Paul is in love with Theresa, and she has developed a affection for him.

She turns the tables on the spy masters and secretly phones the police, who arrive in time to save Phillip after he is captured.

Meanwhile spy master Herrick has encoded a message in a piano piece he will play on a radio concert.

But the cipher guys are ahead of the game. They make a recording of the broadcast. This was before the days of digital recorders. Actually it was before the days of tape recorders, even wire recorders.

And this is what amazed me watching this. They replay the recording while a musical transcriber punches the music in on a transcription writer. They had those way back then.

They analyze the notes for clues to the message, and they crack the code.

This leads them to the ship that is about to depart for a stop in the Canary Islands, where Herrick has plans to drop off yet another copy of the real plans.

And all is reconciled. Paul will marry Theresa, and Philip will marry Helen.

The plot foreshadows the one in Dressed to Kill. That one is a Sherlock Holmes film that came out in 1946 and features a crook in prison smuggling out messages in the tunes of music boxes he crafts and puts out for sale. That does not seem to be an original Author Conan Doyle plot.

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