Crack-Up

Malcolm St. Clair's 1936 Fox espionage thriller gives Peter Lorre, two years after M and newly American, one of his great early Hollywood disguises: Colonel Gimpy, the airport mascot with a toy bugle, who is in fact Baron Tagger, head of a foreign spy ring after bomber blueprints. Brian Donlevy is the disgruntled test pilot; the MacGuffin is the experimental airliner Wild Goose on its maiden flight toward Berlin. Prewar aviation thriller as dress rehearsal: unnamed foreign power, mid-air sabotage, and Lorre already the smiling monster who would define a decade of spy pictures.