Smashing the Spy Ring (1938) Poster

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5/10
Pretty standard stuff.
planktonrules2 February 2019
"Smashing the Spy Ring" is very standard stuff. It's a typical action B-movie of the era...one that manages to get the story told compactly and entertainingly but with little in the way of subtlety or originality. It's basically a simple time-passer.

When the story begins, a government agent dedicated to catching spies is murdered. Two agents (Ralph Bellamy and Regis Toomey) decide to enact a plan in order to prove that a local sanitarium is run by spies. So, they create a fake mishap during the testing of a new poisonous gas and have John Baxter (Bellamy) pretend to be the professor in charge....hoping that his 'amnesia' would make him an attractive target for the spies. Of course, there's bound to be a monkeywrench that appears soon after and threatens to expose the plan!

Predictable fun....with decent acting and a brisk plot. Not at all a must-see but you could do worse!
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3/10
The only thing left after this smashing is dust.
mark.waltz20 March 2019
Warning: Spoilers
There's nothing exciting happening in this pre-World War Ii spy drama that deals with a gang of spies out to get the secrets of a potential new gas as a weapon of fear. Government agents Ralph Bellamy and Regis Toomey seem to be sleepwalking their way through this predictable and one dimensional programmer with a cliched main villain (Walter Kingsford, complete with harsh east European accent) and typical substandard romance concerning Bellamy and Fay Wray. Bellamy is forced to pretend to be under the spell of the sinister Kingsford, not a difficult task considering that he's barely awake anyway. I've seen so many of these assembly line spy dramas that I'm really surprised when I discover through careful research that I've never seen the one I'm watching before. The issue isn't just the repetitive plots, but the juvenile scripts and rather uninvolved performances where even the extras seem to be having difficult time staying awake.
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10/10
10/10
verakomarov17 October 2021
Top U. S. government spy-smasher John Baxter (Ralph Bellamy) does just that as he is aided by Eleanor Dunlap (Fay Wray) and companion federal agent Ted Hall (Regis Toomey) while being highly abetted by top enemy agent Dr. L. B. Carter (Walter Kingsford) and his minions of gang members and henchmen.
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