Tuesday's Overlooked Films: The House On 92nd Street

This 1946 well-done espionage film was made with the assistance of the FBI and even includes an opening shot of J. Edgar Hoover seated at his desk running the operations. Lloyd Nolan, who I enjoyed in his playing Mike Shayne, is an FBI Inspector in charge of pursuing the Nazi spies at work in the USA. They are trying to steal the atomic bomb secrets, and it's up to the FBI to infiltrate and bust up their spy ring. There is a lot of state-of-the-art CSI science shown, all of which looks pretty archaic by today's standards. The actress playing the Gestapo officer is pretty menacing, and the Nazi thugs do a good job of showing how far they'd go to get the bomb-making secrets. Signe Hasso is the attractive, smart Nazi ringleader. I've seen a number of these wartime semi-documentary style movies, and this one is better than most are. Of course, there's a lot of patriotism, and the good guys win. Nonetheless, I found it an entertaining movie.