This was my first look ever at actors William Eythe and Signe Hasso. Hasso struck me as quite the good looking woman but you didn't get to dwell on that since she never cracked a smile in keeping with her character's serious nature. Now Johanna Schmidt (Lydia St. Clair), that's another story. She just looked downright scary.
The picture opens with minimalist introductory credits and proceeds in documentary fashion for a fair amount of time. I started writing down the names of all the German embassy characters mentioned in that early exposition thinking I'd have to keep track of them in the story, but that turned out to be unnecessary. It's pretty much Eythe's show as undercover FBI agent Bill Dietrich, who gets his indoctrination training in Germany, returns to the U.S. to help uncover the Nazi attempt to discover the secrets of the atomic bomb.
Most of the story plays out in tense fashion, but I was bothered by the whole idea of it taking so long for Dietrich's credentials to come back and have his cover blown. Those fifth column folks seemed a bit too trusting and it seemed to me that Dietrich should have been tripped up a lot sooner than he was. Maybe Elsa Gebhardt (Hasso) should have brought out the scopolamine a bit sooner.
What most impressed me about the story was the sheer numbers mentioned in terms of defining America's war effort. Four hundred FBI agents were assigned to 'Process 97', and when World War II ended, over sixteen thousand enemy agents were captured in this country. Catch this one for a look at a different facet of the war, and how foiling the enemy domestically was just as important as any battle.
The picture opens with minimalist introductory credits and proceeds in documentary fashion for a fair amount of time. I started writing down the names of all the German embassy characters mentioned in that early exposition thinking I'd have to keep track of them in the story, but that turned out to be unnecessary. It's pretty much Eythe's show as undercover FBI agent Bill Dietrich, who gets his indoctrination training in Germany, returns to the U.S. to help uncover the Nazi attempt to discover the secrets of the atomic bomb.
Most of the story plays out in tense fashion, but I was bothered by the whole idea of it taking so long for Dietrich's credentials to come back and have his cover blown. Those fifth column folks seemed a bit too trusting and it seemed to me that Dietrich should have been tripped up a lot sooner than he was. Maybe Elsa Gebhardt (Hasso) should have brought out the scopolamine a bit sooner.
What most impressed me about the story was the sheer numbers mentioned in terms of defining America's war effort. Four hundred FBI agents were assigned to 'Process 97', and when World War II ended, over sixteen thousand enemy agents were captured in this country. Catch this one for a look at a different facet of the war, and how foiling the enemy domestically was just as important as any battle.