Chase_Witherspoon A Communist plot to destroy the Panama canal sees a number of passengers join forces in an attempt to overthrow the crew of a ship carrying an atom bomb en route, while an eminent doctor aboard the ship is blackmailed into activating the missile or risk the murder of his daughter.The dialogue is a bit juvenile, and MacLane seems to be hamming it up as the crooked captain, nicknamed "Scarface" for obvious reasons, who smokes a durry like the Penguin and will do anything to honour mother Russia. Erickson is the opportunist who stumbles upon the plot while attempting to escape South America for a relatively minor (by comparison) feud with a local kingpin. Grey is simply wasted, with little to do except wallow in her cabin aboard the doomed ship of "Captain Scarface".The villains are simply described as 'Communists', political jingoism and highly appropriate for 1953, but the film is little more than a B-grade quickie, peddling an array of hokey plot contrivances for a 69 minute back-slapping exercise devoted to subduing a red threat. Hastily resolved, there's very little action of which to speak and despite attempts at intrigue, it's pretty dull an uninspired.

Rincon-7 Fun show to watch instead of the oft repeated reruns on TV. Saw it on TCM channel. No advertising was even better.The ship is the S.S. Banos. On the positive side, was it named after the city? Baños is located on the northern foothills of the Tungurahua volcano. The city is named after the hydrothermal springs of mineral water located around the city.Baños, pronounced correctly in the movie, is also Spanish for bathrooms (plural).Unintended or ?

classicsoncall The film gets credit for it's slow and deliberate pacing in the early going, as it builds suspense toward the revelation of the plot to destroy the Panama Canal. You had to wonder what all the intrigue and mystery was about regarding Clegg (Paul Brinegar), Kroll (John Mylong), Sam Wilton (Leif Erickson) and the film's title character Captain Trednor/Scarface (Barton MacLane). It's not often you catch MacLane at the top of the credits, though he might have been upstaged in this one by Erickson as the hero of the piece. Still, he does a pretty good job when he's on screen, even if that German accent was somewhat distracting.The movie also did a nice job of explaining two key elements that might not have been offered in another film of the era where these kind of details weren't as important. For one, I was thinking about how the original Banos could have been blown up and disappeared without the authorities knowing, and that was handled competently by the Captain's explanation of Clegg's role to Wilton. Speaking of which, having Wilton's character portrayed as a former plantation foreman allowed for his proficiency with a machete. Too bad though about Mrs. Dilts, she seemed like a nice lady.That's not to say the picture didn't have it's share of outlandish elements. An atomic bomb on board a banana freighter? - I don't think so. And how did Scarface manage to secure all the right scientific looking equipment on board the fake Banos without some knowledge of atomic bomb technology? No need to get into that.Say, keep an eye on the handful of scenes starting with Wilton taking out the Captain, up to breaking into the radio room with Crofton; the sweat stains on his shirt and the bruise on his face change size and shape a number of times. Makes one wonder why those scenes weren't filmed one right after another.On balance though, I have no problem recommending this film for devotees of mystery and espionage, especially as a throwback to a time when Communist ideology threatened the very existence of the Western world - remember all those duck and cover drills in elementary school? Ah yes, the 1950's, you had to be there.

Snow Leopard This is a good B-grade action feature that makes good use of an involved story of intrigue. It's an example of how low-budget, shabby looking sets can actually help the atmosphere if they go with the right story, and meanwhile the story itself moves at a decent pace as things gradually unfold.Barton MacLane and Leif Erickson are the stars and antagonists. MacLane is "Captain Scarface", who is masterminding an evil and destructive scheme, while Erickson is a character designed as a Bogart-type antihero who finds himself in the right place and time to try to stop it. Erickson is solid in his role, while MacLane seems to relish his slightly outlandish character, making him interesting and menacing, if not always fully believable.All of the action takes place either at a shabby-looking port-side hotel or on the captain's equally rundown-looking freighter. The no-frills look of both sets makes them believable and helps the atmosphere, since putting the characters in such settings implicitly makes them too seem rather small and tattered.The story itself is easily interesting enough to hold your attention for the running time of slightly more than an hour. The actual plot of the bad guys comes across as somewhat far-fetched, but it is mostly a device to drive the intrigue. The story telling has a few rough edges, as can sometimes be the case with movies of this kind, but it has more than enough pluses to cancel these out. It's definitely worth seeing if you like movies of the genre.