... in this most unusual episode of The Untouchables. It starts out like a typical episode of The Untouchables with Otto Frick (Jack Warden), who deals drugs, escaping from Eliot Ness and the Untouchables who are closing in on him at a county fair.
Ness tries to track down the origin of Frick's drugs, as he has shut down his Canadian and Mexican sources, and finds they are now coming from Nazi Germany. A kind of roving ambassador for Germany, Walter Messlinger (Francis Lederer), tells Frick that the new deal is that he can get his drugs for free if he agrees to be the muscle for the Nazis in America. Now Frick is not an idealist, he is a capitalist, so no appeals to his ancestral homeland are going to work on him, but he agrees to the terms strictly as a business proposition. Thus Messlinger turns his proselytizing attention to Frick's young assistant, also of German descent, Hans Eberhardt (Richard Jaeckel), who turns out to be more malleable much easier to manipulate than Frick.
Jack Warden's gruff style worked for him as the strictly business gangster. Francis Lederer was capable of giving subtle performances. He did so in many films of the 30s and 40s such as in "Romance In Manhattan" where he portrayed an optimistic immigrant during the Great Depression. But here he is almost cartoonish in his impersonation of a Nazi agent. Given the last words of the episode by narrator Walter Winchell -"even now the totalitarian voices are not silenced...you can hear them if you listen" - this was probably not just all about the Nazis, who had long been vanquished. It was probably instead trying to equate the Nazis with the Communists. I can find no other meaning for that final narration.
Ness tries to track down the origin of Frick's drugs, as he has shut down his Canadian and Mexican sources, and finds they are now coming from Nazi Germany. A kind of roving ambassador for Germany, Walter Messlinger (Francis Lederer), tells Frick that the new deal is that he can get his drugs for free if he agrees to be the muscle for the Nazis in America. Now Frick is not an idealist, he is a capitalist, so no appeals to his ancestral homeland are going to work on him, but he agrees to the terms strictly as a business proposition. Thus Messlinger turns his proselytizing attention to Frick's young assistant, also of German descent, Hans Eberhardt (Richard Jaeckel), who turns out to be more malleable much easier to manipulate than Frick.
Jack Warden's gruff style worked for him as the strictly business gangster. Francis Lederer was capable of giving subtle performances. He did so in many films of the 30s and 40s such as in "Romance In Manhattan" where he portrayed an optimistic immigrant during the Great Depression. But here he is almost cartoonish in his impersonation of a Nazi agent. Given the last words of the episode by narrator Walter Winchell -"even now the totalitarian voices are not silenced...you can hear them if you listen" - this was probably not just all about the Nazis, who had long been vanquished. It was probably instead trying to equate the Nazis with the Communists. I can find no other meaning for that final narration.