Joe Smith, American

Actress Marsha Hunt is turning 100 tomorrow, as long as she doesn't die in the next 24 hours. Since she was a contract player at MGM, TCM is able to run a bunch of the B movies she made for the studio in the 1940s. Among them is the interesting Joe Smith, American, which kicks off the day at 6:30 AM.

Marcus Welby (er, Robert Young) stars as Joe Smith, who is married to Mary (that's Marsha Hunt) with a young kid (Darryl Hickman). It would be the perfect suburban family, except that this is late 1941, and the suburbs weren't really a thing yet. (The movie was actually released in February 1942, but most of the planning and production was before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, sending America into the war.) Still, Joe works at one of the defense factories, much like Bob Cummings in Saboteur, another movie that started production before Pearl Harbor but was affected by the entry into World War II. Joe is called into the boss' office at the beginning, and asked a bunch of odd questions. It turns out that the company is going to be developing a new bomb sight, and there are foreign agents who would love that sight.

Joe isn't one of those foreigners; in fact, he's the sort of man who would be a poster boy for Mom and apple pie patriotism, somebody who just wants to do the right thing. And it's hard for him, in that he can't tell his wife or his child about the new responsibilities at work. So Mary doesn't know what's going on when one night, Joe just doesn't return home from work.It turns out that the poor guy has been kidnapped by those enemy agents who want the plans for the bomb sight. There was a foreshadowing scene earlier in the movie in which Joe's son is keeping a secret from him, so Joe uses this as motivation to keep things secret from the bad guys, even though they're going to beat him severely.

The bad guys then put him in a car presumably to take him someplace where they'll kill him, but Joe forces his way out of the moving car, something that unsurprisingly causes him injury and lands him in the hospital. At least he should be safe from the bad guys there. And Joe has an ace up his sleeve. That good memory that Joe had for the bomb sight can be used to remember the things he heard while he was in the bad guys' car, enabling him, with any luck, to lead the police to the place he was kidnapped and with that, the bad guys.

Joe Smith, American is a fairly obvious, quick-moving picture, although that's in no small part because it's a B movie with a short (63 minutes) running time. I tend to prefer Warner Bros.' B movies, but this one is an example of how MGM could make good B movies, too. Sure, it has the obvious propaganda message at the end, but the story as a whole really goes light on the propaganda, leaving the viewer to figure out the fairly simple ideas of why it's important not to let war secrets out, and to beware of saboteurs. Young and Hunt both do fine with routine material.

I don't think that Joe Smith, American is on DVD, and it's one that would really need to be on a box set to be worth picking up.