Waste of time

Excellent adaptation.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Boasting one of the largest casts ever assembled for a "B" movie, "Pacific Blackout" certainly holds the viewer's attention from first to last, despite its disappointingly slack direction from Ralph Murphy who manages to make a potentially exciting, edge-of-the-seat murder mystery just one of those things that audiences used to be trained to come late for. In addition to its incredibly diverse cast, and its inventively unusual story, the movie was most engagingly photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl. Of the players, Robert Preston turns in his usual engaging performance as the harassed hero, and he gets some great support from Martha O'Driscoll and Eva Gabor. Alas, like many of the great pictures in Paramount's library, this movie seems to have disappeared and is not currently available on DVD.