Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Cristi_Ciopron A PRC movie from '44, directed by Sekely, and starring Carradine, J. Carrol Naish as the optometrist (played in a style forecasting Suchet's Poirot), Claire Rochelle as the waitress, Bleifer as the café owner, Maris Wrixon as Freda. But a lousy performance from the bovine Terry Frost as the young businessman Jerry Donavan.The Hauser boardinghouse was at the center of this world, uniting the café (the waitress, the bartender, the owner), the business (Max Kramer, the Hauser daughter, and Jerry), the copper Mike. When the extortionist meets the businessman, he has employees who live in the same boardinghouse with his guest's employee. When the extortionist meets the optometrist, it's the same. The copper knows the Hauser daughter.A spy arrives in the city for an assignment which, even when deciphered, he never completes.The usual complaints are that the movie doesn't resemble MTV ('plods along', 'meanders around a bit'); there has to be something that flatters the half-wits tendency to whine, to grumble, to sulk. Nowadays, even '40s B cinema requires education.Two things: the coppers could of been summoned by the waitress for the shootout; and after the raid, Kramer's denunciation is assumed, guessed by one character.

bkoganbing There's not much to say about Waterfront. It's a typical PRC production with the usual cheap sets and corny dialog and a cast of forgettable players for the most part. It's also a product of its times, a World War II era espionage film.But this one has a pair of acting professionals who in their time managed to create entertainment out of less than this. J. Carrol Naish and John Carradine are a pair of Nazi spies and Naish does an incredibly stupid thing. He gets robbed of his code book while carrying it on his person at the same time Carradine is over from Berlin on a mission.Unfortunately Carradine can't even find out what the mission is without the code book. So even after getting back with a couple of murders the mission whatever it was still can't get done. Carradine and Naish really loath each other and spend the entire film criticizing what each other did.You have to credit these two. John Carradine with that lean and sinister countenance and that menacing voice and J. Carrol Naish that most chameleon of players who could blend into a role of any ethnic and racial type imaginable. Waterfront becomes a great exercise in watching a pair of the best professionals working to make a really laughable film somewhat entertaining.

kevin olzak 1944's "Waterfront" is a reasonable example of a Poverty Row spy picture, this one from PRC rather than Republic or Monogram. None could be considered classics of course, generally set in the US and inexpensively confined to just a few tiny sets. What makes these stand out at all isn't the script but the actors involved, in this case John Carradine and J. Carrol Naish, both undercover Nazi agents working the San Francisco waterfront. Naish's Dr. Carl Decker is an optometrist in possession of a code book that can decipher the secret instructions for Carradine's Victor Marlow, newly arrived and impatient to get started. The film opens with the code book being stolen, and by the time it's over all the bad guys are captured or dead (no one comes off very smart). Just a few months before the iconic PRC "Bluebeard," Carradine relishes his villainy, playing his final Nazi role, while Naish provides good support, as do Edwin Maxwell and John Bleifer, veteran performers all. Actress Maris Wrixon previously worked with Boris Karloff in both Warners' "British Intelligence" and Monogram's "The Ape," and reunited with Carradine in Monogram's "The Face of Marble."

sol **SOME SPOILERS** Nothing new here in this B movie about a Nazi spy network working out of San Francisco. At the very beginning of the movie we see what's obvious the Brooklyn not Golden Gate Bridge as San Francisco optometrist Carl Decker, J. Carrol Nash, is mugged by this dock worker Adolf Mertz as he's leaving his office.Decker who's secretly working for the Nazi gestapo as a spy had this secret decoder book on him that Mertz took and is in no way going to report it to the police. It becomes certain that Mertz was no ordinary mugger but someone who knew how important that book is and now is willing to sell it back to Decker for a hefty price. Decker's controller Victor Marlow, John Carradine, is sent from Germany to check out Decker's progress and what he's up to but is really interested in taking over the Nazi West Coast spy operations himself.With the knowledge that the secret decoder book is in Mertz's hands both Decker & Marlow track him down to this gin mill on the docks named the Anchor Bar & Café owned by Oscar Zimmermann, John Bleifer, who also happens to be a Nazi spy. Marlow going on his own murders Mertz and dumps his body in San Francisco Bay but comes up empty with the secret book which ended up in Zimmermann's office safe. Zimmermann working together with Max Kramer,Edwin Maxwell, another Nazi spy seems to be completely ignorant of what Decker, the head Nazi spy in the city,is involved with! Which goes to show just how ineffective the entire Nazi espionage department was and why it had a lot to do with Germany untimely losing WWII. Meanwhile the treacherous Marlow is now targeting Zimmemann who's trying to blackmail him. This leads to Zimmerman getting himself shot and killed by Marlow as he came to his office, to hand over his blackmail money, who then ends up taking off with the decoder book.As all this is happening pretty German-American girl Freda Hauser, Maris Wrixon, who works for Kramer and in who's house Marlow is a tenant has him threatened her mother Emma, Olga Fabian, that if she doesn't let him stay there he'll have the gestapo put her family, who are stranded in Germany, in a Nazi concentration camp. Marlow is so ridicules that he's willing to reveal his being a Nazi spy and risking being executed just to stay at the Hauser home? Was the food and the room that he stayed at so good that it was worth losing his life for?Marlow somehow finds out that a frightened Kramer is about to spill the beans on his Nazi comrades by confessing, in writing, his involvement with the spy ring in order to get a lighter sentence. It's then that he again goes into action with him sneaking into Kramer's office and murdering him just to keep Kramer from not only talking to the police but implicating himself, and Decker, as well as being Nazi spy's.Things start to go very bad for Decker as his spy network of 19 men gets busted by the FBI and he goes into hiding in this waterfront dive only to have himself get tracked down and shot by his fellow Nazi spy Marlow. The ever so eager to impress his superiors back in Berlin Marlow not only feels that Decker let the Fatherland and his Fhurer down but that he can do a far much better job of spying on the United States.The police in the film are almost as incompetent as the Nazi spy's are as they mistakenly arrest Freda's boyfriend Jerry Donovan, Terry Frost, for the murder of her boss Kramer! This made no sense at all since he was Kramer's best friend and there was nothing stolen, except Kramer's secret confession, from his office. We later see what a total jerk Marlow is when Olga now not caring what happens to her relatives back in Germany tells her daughter Freda that he's is working for the Nazi gestapo and is spying on America, which the arrogant and not so bright Marlow himself told her! Both her and Freda decide to go to the police and have Jerry, who's being framed for Kramer's murder, released with this new and explosive piece of evidence. Marlow getting weirder and more obnoxious by the minute then tries to kidnap both Freda and Olga and take them back home with him to Nazi Germany? In a German U-boat? In the wild shootout that follows with the police who were alerted about Marlow's bizarre behavior, by a number of tenants in Olga's rooming house, he ends up getting cold-cocked by Butch, Billy Nealson, one of the tenants and falls down a staircase and on his head, no damage there. It's then that police come on the scene and grab and arrest him with Butch breaking his right fist that he smashed into Marlow's jaw.One of the lesser efforts by Hollywood in showing the American public how dangerous the Nazis were but as usual making them so ineffective that those watching the movie back then wondered to themselves how they got as far as they did in almost winning WWII, against more then three quarters of the world's population and nine tenths of it's economic power base, in the first place?