The Steel Fist

Another completely new-to-me movie that showed up on TCM not too long ago was The Steel Fist. It was another movie with an interesting-sounding plot, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it.

Roddy McDowall is the star here, and frankly the closest thing to a big name in the cast. He plays Eric Kardin, a university student in an unnamed Eastern European country in the early days of Communism not too long after the Soviet Union installed all those Communist governments following the war. In order to keep agricultural production up, collectivization having been a massive disaster, the authorities more or less "voluntold" groups of people like university students to go help with the harvest. Eric is having none of this, and leads a protest. The protest turns violent, and the authorities vow to catch whoever started it.

Eric has gone running home to his uncle, who is appalled to hear about how his nephew started the protest. Not because uncle is a communist who doesn't want anybody to protest, but because Eric was so impetuous in his protest that it's going to bring trouble on the uncle as well as the nephew, and the uncle is prominent enough in the underground resistance that he's got to be careful about what he does. So Eric is going to have to get himself out of the country, and as soon as possible.

Fortunately, Uncle knows people who know people, and knows how the underground smuggles people out of the country. Eric is instructed to engage in a parody of a bad spy movie by going down to the train station, buying a particular magazine, and dropping it, all at precise times, whereupon he'll get his next set of equally wacky instructions, and so on.

Eventually, Eric winds up getting off the train just at the last stop. On the way, he met Georg (Rand Brooks), a captain in the border patrol, and his girlfriend Marlina (Kristine Miller), nobody knowing until later in the movie that Marlina is actually one of the underground who shows people the way over the mountains that look suspiciously like southern California instead of central Europe. Marlina lives with her brother where the two of them play at being peasants. Unfortunately, word of the student protest has reached the border areas, so the border patrol is increasing its patrols, making escape that much more difficult.

The Steel Fist isn't exactly a great movie, but it's also not a terrible movie. It was made at Monogram, which gives it a look of a cheaply-made production that would probably have been more suitable for some made-for-TV production if it weren't for the fact that this sort of material wasn't quite yet being done straight for TV. It's a lot closer to TV movie of the week material, and I think most of that was being done live and with more highbrow scripts.

But, The Steel Fist runs only a little over an hour, so if you don't like it it's not as if you've wasted a bunch of your time.