Watchdogs of the Mail

From New York’s futuristic pneumatic tube network to rural postmen delivering boxes of chickens, this film takes a countrywide tour of an institution that by 1951 was an integral part of American life. With 40 billion letters and parcels delivered every year, the criminal opportunities proved too tempting to some unscrupulous employees. The most dramatic part of this film is a film noir like reconstruction of an investigation into mail-tampering on the Midwest railroad.

By 1951 the March of Time had seen better days. No longer the controversial, innovative voice of the 1930s, it had begun to seem old-fashioned and at times even boring. This film begins as an informative but hardly gripping account of the US postal service in its boom years. Nonetheless the film receives an injection of adrenaline in the form of two dramatic reconstructions of crimes investigated by a team of Postal Inspectors - the law enforcement arm of the United States Postal Service. The first depicts a mail tampering case; the second ups the drama even more, being a literally explosive reconstruction of a case in which the murder weapon is a parcel bomb and the target, a recently married young woman.