Made in 1942 and nominated for an Academy Award, this MGM short is entitled DON’T TALK. It was part of the so-called “Crime does not Pay” series, and focuses on industrial sabotage during wartime. After a valuable shipment of manganese is blown up at a material plant, the FBI try to find out how information on the manganese shipment was found out. They get a lead on one of the plotters, Beulah Anderson, who as a waitress in a café gets to pick up all kinds of scuttlebutt from the innocent but loose talking clients. Once they figure out how she is sending the information she gathers, the FBI sets a trap. The moral of the story is: Don’t Talk!

MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series got started in an interesting way. After the Production Code ax fell most gangster pictures were no longer viable. The same thing happened to horror films, for other reasons. Warner Bros. took the lead by making a crime film. In this new type of film, former Public Enemy James Cagney played one of J. Edgar Hoover’s “G-Men” and hunted down gangsters, while still behaving a bit like a gangster himself, at least in terms of swagger and style. MGM caught the lawman-hero bandwagon by inaugurating Crime Does Not Pay, an anti-crime, pro- good citizen series that would serve as sort of a consumer guide to warn middle America against the evils springing up around them.

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com