Just what I expected

Disturbing yet enthralling

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

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.

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.

PRC Studios ordinarily produced pretty rudimentary cinema. A handful of spare sets, few actors, few extras, studio bound. The plots were such that if the phrase "B Feature" didn't exist it would have had to be invented.This one, though, has an edge. The art direction isn't bad. No waterfront neighborhood ever existed like the ones we see in old movies -- sailors slouching around, hands in their pockets, cigarettes dangling from their lips, gathered in crowded little saloons with names like "The Anchor Bar," the narrow streets wreathed in cold fog. It's a fantasy waterfront but it works well enough.The performances are (mostly) decent as well, although I wasn't always on top of who had the little black book that was stolen from German agent J. Carrol Naish. Since everyone on the other side of the law seemed to be German, why would one agent hinder the operations of another? Well, the black book is just the MacGuffin anyway.Naish uses his go-anywhere accent. John Carradine is an impressive figure in a long black coat and black fedora. His figure is gaunt and his features sepulchral. Ominous all over, you know? And he's more reckless than the other spies. He wants to take over the gang in San Francisco and represent the Gestapo, although why he'd want to represent the German secret police instead of the intelligence agency, the Abwehr, the writers neglect to explain. I suppose the very word "Gestapo" generated chills.It's fast. Some of the Germans are forced to cooperate and others are completely unaware of what's going on, as is the viewer, occasionally.I kind of got a kick out of it.

I just saw this movie and thought, on the whole, that this is a worthwhile WWII spy flick.John Carradine provided a very good, very chilling performance as the lead "bad guy". Other performances were sound. The script seemed to me to be fairly solid as well. The general flavor of foggy, drippy, SF waterfront "trouble" was effective and appealing.This was produced in 1944 when, of course, domestic spying was a real concern, and ethnic heritage in an Axis nation could sometimes excite not always fair concerns about loyalty. All the more impressive, then, is the sympathetic depiction of a German-American family.All in all a film worth seeing if you like WWII-era flicks about the war and espionage.