Joe Smith, American
[2] The film, loosely based on the story of Herman W. Lang, and the theft of plans of a top-secret bombsight, is the account of a worker at an aviation factory who is kidnapped by enemy spies.When plant president Mr. Edgerton and his supervisor Blake McKettrick calls him into his office, Joe is grilled by two men from Washington, Freddie Dunhill and Gus, who later ask him to draw from memory a blueprint put in front of him.The prewar arrest of a German factory worker who stole the plans of the Norden bombsight was the basis of the story, with stock photography of the Lockheed Aircraft company incorporated to provide a wartime look.[2] In his review Theodore Strauss wrote, in The New York Times,"In its own simple and unassuming way, Joe Smith, American, now at the Criterion, does more to underscore the deep and indelible reasons why this country is at war than most of the recent million-dollar epics with all their bravura patriotism.Instead, the author and director have simply taken one commonplace American and shown, in one tense and sharply cut event when his country's safety was at stake, how it was the little things, the small remembrances of what his life had been, that pulled him through.