Secret Command" is an espionage and sabotage movie that takes place in the U. S. home front during World War II. The plot involves a secret group of Nazis who have infiltrated the shipbuilding yards of a company on the West Coast. Their plot is to blow-up and shut down the plant and its shipbuilding. This story is quite different from other such films. This plot has the main counter-intelligence undercover guy set up in a home with a wife and two children. That makes this a unique film of sorts. The two children are a little girl and a young boy who are orphans from England. The tug at the heart of this story raises it at least one star.
And, the film would rate even one more but for the very poor technical quality. The movie is so dark that it appears to have been filmed without the use of any lighting. Even daytime scenes with daylight in the picture seem very dark, and some of the scenes within the plant obscure the faces of the actors completely. It might have been a little better seeing it in theaters of the time, but still very dark If it was purposeful and intended to add a sense of darkness to the plot, it only lessened the film.
There's a subplot of sorts in that the main character and his brother have been estranged since before the start of the war. Pat O'Brien plays Sam Gallagher, brother of Jeff Gallagher who is a foreman or construction boss in the shipyard. Chester Morris plays Jeff who has a chip on his shoulder because Sam dropped out of sight and wouldn't even answer letters and a wire telling him that their mother had died He and Sam's former girlfriend, Lee Damaron, played by Ruth Warrick, learn at the end why that was so. The audience knows well before by some scenes between Sam and Jill and with James Thane, played by Charles Brown.
Sam had been working as a newspaper foreign correspondent. Jeff checked up on him and found out that he was dismissed from that job four years earlier. And, that was in Berlin, which would have been shortly after Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France went to war with Germany. At the end, Jeff and Lee learn that Sam had been in a German concentration camp for a year and was now working for U. S. intelligence.
This is one of a few things that this film is fuzzy on. If Sam had been a member of the press, he would have been expelled from Germany for anything derogatory he might have written about Germany. If he had quit and went into Army intelligence or any other espionage effort, he would have been shot as a spy, and not put in a concentration camp. Only uniformed combatants and political prisoners were put in POW camps. So, Sam must have joined the American forces after the U. S entered the war in 1941, and he must have been in uniform to have been imprisoned rather than executed. Well, the studio didn't make any effort to clarify this at all, so the audience is left hanging as Hollywood goofs on this point. Movie audiences decades later wouldn't give that a thought, but you can bet people were alert to such things while they were living in those times.
The one other quite dumb aspect in the film is Jeff suspecting something about brother Sam and Lee hearing from Sam and Jill different locations where they were married - London, says Sam; Paris, says Jill. One doesn't have to be able to pass the second grade to realize that any intelligence undercover project would first have all the participants learn everything about their past for a cover story. That showed the American intelligence group, whatever it is or was, to be grossly incompetent.
Carole Landis plays Jill McGann, the woman who poses as Sam's wife. Barton MacLane plays Red Kelly, Wallace Ford is Miller, Tom Tully is Col. Hugo Von Braun -- "Brownie" to the shipbuilding crew. These and others do so-so in their performances. Carol Nugent is the six-year old orphan girl, Joan, who plays Sam's daughter. And, Richard Lyon plays her 12-year-old brother, Paul.
There are other movies about attempted Nazi sabotage of American industry during the war, and most are better than this film - for the technical quality and the acting. But the angle of an undercover agent living in a home with actors playing family roles is quite different. Especially when it involved two children who were war orphans from England.
