POSTAL INSPECTOR: going postal - in a good way

POSTAL INSPECTOR crams more action and "who knew?!" moments into its 58 minutes running time than many other films manage in twice the time.

Who knew that a small boy could play a mouth organ within the confines of the crowded cabin of a passenger plane and not have it rammed down his throat ? Who knew that a nightclub singer could make herself heard above the noise of the plane's engines to soothe those same passengers with a song ? Who knew it's possible to fit four musical numbers, a romance, a bank robbery and a flood of biblical proportions into less than an hour? And who knew the US Postal Service had it's own police force?
Universal's 1936 POSTAL INSPECTOR is an endearingly low budget peon of praise to those men who kept the mail moving through all manner of natural and man made disasters while also relentlessly pursuing those who'd committed mail fraud. In amongst the songs, the snogging and the storms the film also finds time for comedy with a parade of plain honest folk parading through the Postal Inspector's office with the useless gadgets and contraptions they've been conned into buying from mail order adverts. 
Inspector Bill Davis is the unflappable USPS employee for whom all of the above is in a day's work. As played by the heavy lidded Ricardo Cortez, Davis takes all of this in his stride while also keeping a paternal eye on his younger brother's burgeoning romance with nightclub singer Connie Larrimore (Patricia Ellis).
And if all of this isn't reason enough to invest an hour of your time to watch there's also Bela Lugosi in a rare non-horror role as Connie's shifty manager, a bad impression of President Franklin D Roosevelt, and a cruelly uncredited Hattie McDaniel duetting with Ms Larrimore.
The plot's riddled with more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese, and the acting's not going to win any awards but POSTAL INSPECTOR is a thoroughly enjoyable romp and an entertaining example of the now long extinct B-movie.