User Reviews

Here's a quickie programmer with plenty of action and thrills but not much logic: it has the feel of a cliffhanger serial, with thrills for their own sake and at the expense of a plausible script.

Raymond Davis is a handsome agent for some outfit called the Secret Police. (Do they really exist? I guess it's a secret.) His subchief (deadpan actor Paul Scardon) assigns Davis to meet an arriving ocean liner and to intercept its passenger Baron Barcellos. Anybody who calls himself Baron Barcellos might as well be carrying a flashing red neon sign that says "VILLAIN": sure enough, Barcellos is a diamonds smuggler.

Aboard the ship, Barcellos befriends a jeweller named Hall and his beautiful daughter Elaine. Barcellos hides his sparklies in a fountain pen (so that he can stay OUT of the pen) and asks Hall to hold it for him. Barcellos submits to a search by Davis but comes up clean (I guess the pen didn't leak) and he retrieves the diamonds that Hall kept on ice. Then Barcellos goes off to sell his hot ice to a mysterious crimelord.

SPOILERS NOW. The crimelord turns out to be Hall, a fact which Barcellos didn't know when he asked Hall to hold the diamonds! D'you see what I mean about logic? Meanwhile, the Plot-O-Matic keeps on churning. Davis and Elaine fall in love. Barcellos's vampy accomplice Tina tries to frame Davis for a crime. Everyone chases everyone else. (Well, Paul Scardon cools his heels at headquarters.)

There are some thrilling sequences here, including an automobile chase, a fistfight, and some stunts aboard a moving train. Can I get off here, driver? Thrills and spills but no plausibility. The whole affair is nicely photographed, briskly paced and edited, and there are some impressive moving shots during the chases. Oh, and the title refers to room 413. This movie feels episodic, as if everyone involved just wants to get to the next thrill. When my head stops spinning, I'll rate this one 6 out of 10.