This is a diverting, entertaining, interesting, tense, and ultimately still-relevant story of agents of the Soviet Union smuggling parts of an atomic bomb into the US of A and planning to explode it in San Francisco, the swine.
John Ireland is part of a counter espionage federal agency and is given the assignment of finding out who is smuggling all these A-bomb parts into the country. They're being brought in by ordinary people in suitcases, each suitcase containing one third of a bomb. There are forty-eight people all together -- or forty-eight bombs or forty-eight suitcases. I found myself confused from time to time.
Before you can enjoy watching this Cold War paranoia piece, you have to work your way through several layers of dreck. First, you need not simply suspend disbelief. You must first strap it down, cut it open, disembowel it, and stuff its abdominal cavity full of minced Habanero chili peppers. All sorts of improbabilities pop up, large and small.
Example of small thing. Two men are holding John Ireland prisoner in the back seat of a car. One man offers him a cigarette. Ireland accepts the cigarette, pulls out the red hot cigarette lighter from its socket, and jabs it into the man's hand. Then he leans over and strangles the man into unconsciousness, while the victim sits there passively and grimaces. The other captor merely watches the goings on. Ireland leaps from the car and escapes.
That's a small thing. Here's a big difference between the observed frequency and the expected frequency. Those forty-eight suitcases? (Or people or bombs?) They were all part of a war-game exercise run without Ireland's knowledge by the agency he's part of. When this is revealed -- after all the intrigue, danger, and pain -- it's like one of those endings in which the hero is about to die and then wakes up from the nightmare. Big joke.
The problem, though, is that it develops there was a forty-ninth suitcase -- or bomb or person. Real Russians were pulling a fast one on us while using our drill as a screen. But, you -- the discerning viewer ask -- you wonder how the Russians could possibly have known that such a super-secret exercise was taking place? Is that the question? Answer: You are justified in asking the question.
I understand that this movie was made by a couple of schlockmeisters, but, as I said, it's entertaining nonsense. And it doesn't seem nearly as cheap as some of the sci-fi B movies of the period. The helicopters are real, not models. The airplanes are real. The submarine is real. And if the actors don't shoot out the lights, well -- what do you want, egg in your beer?
John Ireland is curiously reassuring. His squinty eyes are too close together, barely kept apart by the bridge of his nose. And he's not well directed. When he's having an earnest conversation with a colleague, he seems to be arguing with some heat, not explaining something to a friend. The writing is a bit clumsy at times as well, but fortunately Ireland is given only one rah-rah speech about "you and your kind", without using that exact phrase.
The ending is a happy one, though hard to believe for too many reasons to list here. But I do wish it were as difficult to smuggle the makings of a bomb into this country as the film tries to persuade us it is. I live half an hour from the Mexican border. I believe I could smuggle forty-eight or forty-nine bomb parts across that border without being caught. It doesn't take 49 bombs. It just takes one. The USSR is no more, but the threat will always be there.
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