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The treasury department follows a ring of counterfeiters to a
travelling circus - where they ask acrobat Bert (Harry Lauter) for
assistance in smoking out the counterfeiters. No sooner is he hired that
the baddies make an attempt on his and his girlfriend/stage partner June's
(Fran Bennett) life, sabotaging his trapeze act over a cage of lions. Bert
is quick to figure the riggers Daley (Keith Richards) and Travis (Terry
Frost) were behind this, and they soon enough make a hasty getaway. And
it's true, they are part of the counterfeiting ring, are the contact
persons of the money printer Zorn (Robert Shayne) himself, an Eastern
European citizen who prints money in a shipwreck underwater with the
intention of shipping it out of the country to Europe to this way
devaluate the US Dollar. But even he has a boss - a mysterious figure who
might work with the circus, but whose identity is unknown. This mystery
man is more than eager to have Bert removed permanently - mostly with the
help of Daley and Travis, but this only leads to a series of chases and
shootouts that bring Bert closer and closer to the top secret shipwreck.
Eventually, this leads to a big shootout in which Daley, Travis and Zorn
all die, and all the printing equipment is secured ... and their boss is
so clumsy he reveals himself to be the circus owner (Robert Shayne) when
he tries to make too quick a getaway AFTER those who could have identified
him are killed. He ultimately dies falling off a trapeze, fittingly ... This
last ever Republic serial shows above else why the format was put
to rest: Apparently, nobody showed any real interest in making this
something special anymore, so the storytelling is lame, the action is
repetitive (even if it's spiced up with footage from earlier better
serials, reaching as far back as to the 1930's), everything is reduced to
a handful of locations, and even if the story is about a global crisis,
there are only a handful of characters involved. And while the story at
least tries to be current, picking up on a Cold War scenario, it rather
clumsily marries the basic plot to a circus background and leaves way too
much unexplained (like why print forged Dollars in the USA if they are
meant for the foreign market, and how can a single hand-operated printing
press ever bring a currency as strong as the Dollar to a collapse? Now add
to that a lazy direction and an at best mediocre cast and you've got ...
well, not really a disaster, just something you've seen much better
elsewhere.
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