Don't Talk is a 1942 American short film (22 minutes) directed by Joseph Newman.
It's an installment in MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series of two-reel shorts. With the United States having entered World War II, the series shifts from dramatizing gangsters and other domestic hoodlums, to wartime sabotage.
A bomb at an industrial plant wrecks a consignment of manganese, a metal important to armaments production. The FBI interviews workers at the plant and soon comes to believe that they may have blurted out information while having lunch at the diner across the street. They zero in on the waitress, Beulah (Gloria Holden of Dracula's Daughter), who is soon established to be a secret agent. However they still want to discover how Beulah transmits her messages and who the other members of the spy ring are. Meanwhile, the members of the spy ring, who are working for the Japanese, focus on their next target, a shipment of machine parts.
This film had a second connection to the Dracula series: Dwight Frye, who played Renfield in the original 1931 Dracula, appears as the saboteur.
Tropes:
- Binocular Shot: Seen when the FBI guys, maintaining a surveillance on the Elite Cafe, watch Beulah changing out the menu display (which contains the secret messages).
- Bond Villain Stupidity: At the sabotage point where the bad guys are waiting to blow a bridge, they get the drop on and kidnap our FBI heroes. However, they don't just shoot them, no, they take them alive to the bad guy rendezvous point. This allows our heroes to overpower them, steal the car, escape, and warn off the convoy of trucks.
- Framing Device: As with most films in the "Crime Does Not Pay" series, the MGM Crime Reporter (an actor) introduces a law enforcement professional (another actor) who tells the story.
- Hard-Work Montage: A montage has FBI lab techs examining everything from the diner—the linen tablecloths, the cans of food, the garbage, even the bread, looking for hidden messages. They fail, as the hidden messages are actually in the window sign.
- Invisible Writing: The head of the sabotage ring pulls out a souvenir calendar advertising trips to Hawaii for Japanese tourists. He rubs a cloth over the calendar and reveals a circle around December 7. Obviously, Admiral Yamamoto had a very poor grasp of the "need to know" principle!
- Medium Awareness: The "MGM Crime Reporter" cheerfully tells the audience at the start of the film that all events depicted are fictitious.
- Plunger Detonator: The saboteur played by Dwight Frye rigs one up at the bridge but doesn't get to use it, as the FBI warns off the truck convoy and then arrives to make the arrest.
- Public Secret Message: Eventually the FBI guys figure out that Beulah is getting her intelligence out by rearranging the letters in the menu posted in the front window of the diner. Her partners in the spy ring have a cipher that consists of a sheet with holes cut in it; applying the sheet to a picture of the sign reveals the message hidden inside.
- Spy Fiction: Stale Beer flavor, as the FBI ferrets out a spy ring working for the Japanese to cripple the American war effort.
- Time-Passes Montage: A montage shows the FBI going through a series of tests and searches, such as checking the outgoing linen of the Elite Cafe for Invisible Writing, rooting through the diner's garbage, ripping apart discarded bread to see if messages are hidden inside. All tests are fruitless until they figure out that the intelligence is going out via Public Secret Message.
