There are some movies that you have to say are just bad. there is nothing remotely sensible or enjoyable about them, and if there are a few surprising moments, that is just a coincidence. This Republic programmer from 1939 is at the bottom rung of films released in Hollywood's greatest year. the problem is that it does not know what it wants to be. Is it a political drama intermix with mob action? Is it a study of the future of television? Or as we see in the final real, is it a disaster film in the line of 1933 lost RKO film "Deluge"? the answer to that question is unfortunately a bit of all three and that leaves this programmer with a complete identity crisis.

Ralph "Dick Tracy" Byrd has perfected the invention of the roving eye, a camera with the ability to film incidents as they happened live for those rich enough to afford the machines to watch them on. Like the early days of real television, citizens passing by the display of the not yet easily available device would gather outside the store selling it and be amazed in what it was showing.the film pretty much focuses on local fires, some pretty hideous and obviously taken from newsreels of the time oh, and by the time It gets to the climatic sequence, it's amazing that it hasn't shown the Hindenburg disaster.

One moment In this film will stand out. A deliberate crash into a car by a speeding truck that kills Byrd's beloved uncle, George Barbier, and only injuring the other passengers inside. witnessing this Speedy Cash, it is obvious to me that everybody should have been killed instantly. If that is it isn't bad enough, people run up to the car as if the camera has been sped up to make them look like characters in a silent movie. Obviously this is part of the plot line dealing with the upcoming political election, and that is barely dealt with when all of a sudden New York is struck by a huge earthquake followed by a giant tidal wave.

It is not shocking to see from this Republic programmer that the footage of New York being destroyed did indeed come from "Deluge". Having seen the Italian dubbed surviving print of that film, I didn't recall the footage looking so ridiculous. But the way the building's collapse is as if someone blew on a beautifully decorated house of cards painted to look like Manhattan, followed by a bucket of water forcibly thrown on it. The footage is out of place yet would mean a different title, but even that would be an improvement over what remains.

Kay Sutton, Frank Jenks and Dorothy Lee from the Wheeler and Woolsey films co-star in this flatly made mess of themes that will leave you frustrated by its split personality. The film should have focused only on the crime issues of the political plot line and forgotten the disaster footage completely. It makes no sense and pretty much only distracts from the weakness of the script, but in retrospect is the reason why this film fails. It only points out the script's weakness and Desperation of the writers to end with something thrilling that ultimately is a massive let-down.

Really bad program film from Republic starring Ralph Byrd as a TV reporter who tries to stay out of a dirty political race for mayor in New York but instead finds that he's drawn in. The conclusion of the film uses, yet again, sequence lifted from the film Deluge, which shows the destruction of New York by tidal wave. Illogical and dumb, this movie speculates a world where TV is in every home. It's a novel idea that's some 15 years too soon which makes the power of Byrd's character as a pundit all the more hard to swallow. The twists and turns he and his family are put through make so little sense that when in one scene Byrd is seen getting drunk in a bar one can only speculate that the real reason was that the actor had just read the script and realized what a piece of garbage he had agreed to front. The worst twist or turn is the fact that wide spread panic and rioting results from a "news" broadcast in New York showing the destruction of the city. The idea is to keep people home from the polls, but that would have required the mass of people to both have TVs and then not look outside their windows to see everything was alright. To say that the logic gap in the plot is huge is a beyond an understatement. One of the stupidest and most moronic films I've ever seen which is saying a great deal.

I saw this movie once on early television when they were struggling to get anything to fill hours. Every decent station had its own musical groups performing live, with fill in material done by known singers such as Burl Ives and others. These were the first music videos.

The plot was pretty thin but still memorable for me. Suppose the mob wants to spoil the election and arranges for every station in town to play a live documentary or newscast about the tidal wave hitting New York. Everyone would be glued to the TV box and forget to go vote. Thus the ward bosses get out to vote against the mayor, district attorney? Whoever. Somebody with some alertness realized that a building which had gone down was still transmitting stock news on the ticker. Whoa, call New York, confirm,get the voters out.

The production period suggests to me that this was cheap science fiction using the tidal wave footage from another movie. It was obviously influenced by the great radio shocker which warned not to simulate live news in a fictional invasion from Mars story.

Another reviewer suggests this was all so poorly done it was among the most horrible movies made. Maybe so. I can't address the effete aesthetics of film criticism because it has been too long and I have never had another chance to see it. HOWEVER, nobody in 1939 had a clue about what television coverage would be like on a large scale.

Consider our real coverage in the last fifty years. Big news happens and all stations replay and analyze the three minutes of film everybody has. Experts are called in ad nauseum to analyze in microscopic speculation to fill time until there is real news. But, there have been some really momentous broadcast moments which were live.

The early space race could not have been done without Walter Cronkite and the other guys giving us the scoop from mission central. One morning in the sixties I was almost late to work because nearly live pictures of the moon were being broadcast as they came in, each one closer than the last. The final frame was only half a picture because the vehicle sending the pictures took processing time for each frame. Viewers knew when the impact was because the picture snowed out.

Even science fiction writers failed to predict the amazing coverage of the lunar landings. We were there on live television sent all over earth. (Right, all shot in a studio and faked.) Even O. J. Simpson's Mars mission (Capricorn One ?) couldn't make that wash.

Considering the magnitude of the impact live television coverage has had in the last sixty years, at least give the people who came up with the idea some credit. Think about the impact of all the drug money selling us prescriptions and tell me a "live" disaster broadcast on all stations would not do something. I have listened to Orson Welles Mercury Theatre Mars broadcast many times. I have talked to old timers who knew it was just a story and those who were fooled.

Spielberg paid tribute to the gullibility of television viewers in his Mars story. Picture Cruise ignoring the CNN coverage of what was going on in Europe because strange things were happening down the block. Schlock O Schlock Tidal Wave? Maybe, but it certainly predicted the influence television would have. Give it a break.