Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard (Columbia, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Wednesday, April 30) I showed my husband Charles an intriguing movie on YouTube which had caught my attention because of its rather clunky title: Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard. It was a Columbia Pictures “B” from 1950 and the reason for the title was it was based on a long-running (15 years, from 1942 to 1957) radio show called Counterspy created by Phillips K. Lord, who was also responsible for Gangbusters, Mr. District Attorney, and We, the People. According to the description by the Old Time Radio Researchers group on archive.org, “Airing on the NBC Blue radio station (later becoming ABC) and the Mutual Network from 1942 to 1957, this show helped fill the need of radio listeners who wanted some WWII and post-WWII espionage. David Harding was the chief of US Counterspies, a fictional organization. US Counterspies was involved in all sorts of espionage and counter-espionage against Japan’s Black Dragon and Germany’s Gestapo.” Of course, after World War II ended and the U.S. “line” changed so the dastardly foreign enemies were the Soviet Union and (after 1949) “Red” China instead of Germany and Japan, Daniel Harding and his counterspies went after foreign spies in the pay of Russia and China. There was actually an earlier “B” film in this short-lived Columbia series called Daniel Harding, Counterspy, which is also available on YouTube, and I downloaded the 67 surviving episodes of the nearly 800 Counterspy radio shows that aired. One nice thing about Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard, directed by Seymour Friedman and written by Harold Greene, was that like the 1949 Lippert film Sky Liner it was about international intrigue but blessedly avoided the usual Cold War chest-thumping anti-Communist propaganda of espionage films of this period.

The title Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard relates to the fact that in addition to Daniel Harding (Howard St. John, in a role played by many different actors on the radio show), the U.S. Counterspies are helped by a visiting detective from London’s Scotland Yard, Simon Langton (Ron Randell, in a much more personable role than the one he’d play five years later in I Am a Camera, the original film of Cabaret). The story takes place in the fictional town of Croftona (presumably in California even though all the voice-over narration specifies is it’s somewhere in the American Southwest), where various missile guidance systems are being tested. The guidance systems are being developed by Dr. Schuman (Gregory Gaye), presumably one of the old Nazi rocket scientists both the U.S. and the Soviet Union brought over en masse after World War II. Alas, detailed information on the design and success rate of these guidance systems is leaking out to the enemy, and in the opening scene a U.S. Counterspies agent named Don Martin (Harry Lauter) calls the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to report that he’s found out the source of the leaks. Since the person he was trying to reach isn’t in, his message is recorded onto a wire recorder – a nice bit of retro tech to see in a movie of the right vintage – in essentially the 1950 equivalent of voicemail. Unfortunately, not only does he not give the name of the leaker or any idea how the information is being extracted, but the next thing we hear of him is that he was found dead, an apparent suicide. Don Martin made his phone call to Washington at the desk of his secretary, Karen Michelle (Amanda Blake, later saloon owner “Kitty” in the long-running Western TV series Gunsmoke). “Is that his drag name?” I joked after I saw her name tag on his desk. It turns out that Karen is the source of the leaks, but only unwittingly.

Her best friend, Barbara Taylor (June Vincent), who met her in a displaced persons’ camp after World War II and then emigrated with her to the U.S., induced her to go to supposed psychiatrist Dr. Victor Gilbert (Lewis Martin) to treat what would now be called her post-traumatic stress disorder. Only Barbara Taylor is part of the enemy spy ring, and so is Dr. Gilbert, whose real name is “Karl Borne” and is from Czechoslovakia. Dr. Gilbert regularly puts Karen under an hypnotic drug (presumably sodium pentothal, regularly hyped in 1950’s crime dramas as “truth serum”) and, once she’s under, gets her to repeat the information about the guidance systems and the results of their tests. Dr. Gilbert records this on a Dictaphone which uses flexible plastic bands on which to do a stylus-and-groove recording (I did find it amusing that the good guys used wire recorders and the bad guys used Dictaphones). From the way Dr. Gilbert folds the recording after he makes it, first to conceal it inside the cork that closes a bottle of drinking water and then to seal it inside an envelope so he can send it to the gang’s contact in Argentina, I’m surprised it could still track properly once it got to its sinister destination. The Counterspies agents trace Karen’s movements and Simon Langton is assigned to date her to learn what she’s doing in her off hours. Naturally Langton is genuinely attracted to her and accepts the assignment with relish. There are so many vans in the movie used by both the good guys and the bad guys as cover for their operations that it gets a little hard to keep track of them and remember which one is which.

The bad guys are using the Craftona bottled-water company as well as the local laundry, while the good guys are posing as repair people for the local electric power utility. There’s a quirky scene in which one of the Counterspies agents sneaks down a manhole and grabs a set of exposed wires; at first I thought they were phone lines and the Counterspies were installing a wiretap on Dr. Gilbert’s phone, but later it turned out they were cutting off the power to Dr. Gilbert’s live-work space so they could then install a bug by posing as workmen there to restore his electrical connection. They also get his fingerprint by posing as delivery people bringing him an ultraviolet lamp he didn’t order, then telling him to sign for it even though the lamp was supposed to go to another doctor in the area. As part of the Counterspies’ operation, Simon Langton disguises himself as a much older man named “Mr. Winters” (his get-up for this impersonation makes him look strikingly like Robert Donat in the later scenes of Goodbye, Mr. Chips) and demands to see Dr. Gilbert without an appointment. Barbara Taylor “outs” him by recognizing Simon’s unusual watch, so Dr. Gilbert is able to cut the power cord to the Counterspies’ clandestine microphone. He gives Simon a drug to put him under while he prepares the information he’s already extracted from Karen about the long-range missile test (which featured a real live atomic warhead, something that didn’t ring true to me because not even the U.S. government in 1950 would have risked an accidental nuclear detonation against Americans if the guidance system hadn’t worked properly) to be smuggled out on his Dictabelt via a cork in an empty water bottle. Fortunately, before he goes out and loses consciousness completely Simon is able to revive himself somewhat by inhaling spirits of ammonia, and he throws an object through Dr. Vincent’s window and thereby alerts the Counterspies to the fact that he needs rescuing. Dr. Gilbert and Barbara Taylor are arrested, the data are recovered after a quick chase scene in which local police and Counterspy agents stop the water truck in time, and once Simon is convinced Karen was only an unwitting spy, they prepare to get married and move back to his native Britain. Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard was a surprisingly good movie, not at all film noir (as YouTube billed it) but a fast-moving and reasonably exciting thriller, a neatly done souvenir from the later days of the “B” movie which television was about to put out of business because the boob tube was a much more lucrative sort of entertainment for cheap films like this with reasonably competent but hardly star-level casts.