David Harding, Counterspy (Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work on May 8 in time to catch the last few minutes of the “Aperture” episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and I was originally going to change the channel to watch Elsbeth on CBS until it turned out to be a rerun of an episode we’d already seen, in which one-half of a two-brother team of cutthroat stockbrokers decides he’s tired of the fast life and the meanness that goes with it and is going to give his money away – and his brother kills him over it. Instead we ended up on YouTube watching the first film in Columbia Pictures’ short-lived Counterspy series based on a popular (lasting 15 seasons, 1942-1947) radio show produced by Phillips H. Lord, creator of Gangbusters, Mr. District Attorney and We, the People. Like its successor, Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard, this film, David Harding, Counterspy, was made in 1950 and featured not very prepossessing actor Howard St. John as David Harding, leader of the U.S. government’s ultra-secret Counterspy agency. This film actually tells most of its story in a flashback sequence set in 1943, in which the principal enemies of the United States were Germany and Japan. It’s centered around a torpedo factory in a fictitious small town called Malino, New Mexico (at least I’m presuming it’s in New Mexico because, though writers Cliff Johnston and Tom Reed don’t tell us for sure, that’s where the cars’ license plates are from), in which a young Navy officer named Iverson is found dead. Ostensibly he burned himself to death by accident in his apartment, but David Harding is convinced he was really murdered. So is his best friend, Lieutenant Commander Jerry A. Baldwin (Willard Parker), who’s resentful at being called away from his other duties to investigate Iverson’s death and find out who’s responsible for sabotaging the output of the Malino factory so its torpedoes don’t travel accurately to their targets the way they’re supposed to. It also turns out that Baldwin was the boyfriend of Iverson’s widow Betty (Audrey Long) until she jilted him to marry Iverson.

As Baldwin takes the late Iverson’s job and inherits Betty as his secretary, the romance between them rekindles and they start dating each other at a combination nightclub, dance hall and dive bar called the Jade Café. What Baldwin doesn’t know – and neither do we until the writers give us the information about halfway through this 70-minute movie – is that Betty herself is part of the sabotage plot, working for a white-haired old guy named Dr. George Vickers (Raymond Greenleaf) – what was it with the Counterspy writers about making doctors the heads of their villainous plots? The second film, Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard, also featured a doctor as the principal villain and a woman secretary as his main contact, though in Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard the woman was just an unwitting spy: the doctor was extracting secret information from her under the guise of giving her hypnotic treatments to combat her post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Vickers realizes that, while she was never in love with Iverson, she’s attracted enough to Baldwin that Betty has become a liability in their plot. Ultimately Betty gets herself shot and killed trying to protect Baldwin from the baddies’ plot – an ending mandated by the Production Code, though I was expecting Betty to survive at the end, turn state’s evidence against the saboteurs, get a light sentence and marry Baldwin when she got out. David Harding, Counterspy didn’t really gain anything from the flashback structure, and though the film could have been stronger if Johnston and Reed had done more to illustrate Betty’s crisis of conscience (go along with her role in the villains’ plot or Confess All to Baldwin out of love for him as well as her country?), as it stands it’s just a pretty ordinary thriller and hardly what I was hoping for when I looked it up on YouTube after Charles and I had quite liked Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard.