Clark learns that the man in charge of the statuette smashing and buying is a notorious con man named Paul Martin. Clark reviews what he knows with police Insp. Bill Henderson (not to be confused with Mark Fuhrman's mother Billie in Henderson, NV)... Clark: Now we know that all the statues were shipped from one European factory. We also know that Martin found seven object in the statues... and they were an acorn, a safety pin, a toy automobile, a little plastic cow, an onion, a dollar bill and three pennies. Inspector: Doesn't make any sense. Clark: Must be a code of some sort. I haven't had a chance to work it out yet but I've got an idea... Lois uses the heel of her shoe to break a plaster animal she bought from Martin's list of stores and finds the brass key. She puts it in a tube of lipstick and puts the lipstick in her purse. Martin kidnaps Lois. He goes through her purse and finds the key. Lois escapes Clark has broken the code. He sets up a chalkboard in the police inspector's office to show him and Lois how it works. Lois is impressed with his drawing ability. Lois: Now we have an artist in our midst, inspector. Clark: At least it'll give you an idea... The objects Martin and his men found in the plaster statuettes make up what is called a rebus. Here's how it works [he writes below the names of the objects on the board as he speaks]. Starts with acorn... plus pin...Now, we subtract car [he goes back to the word acorn and crosses out the letters c, a and r.]. Now we add moo for cow... Now we subtract onion [he goes back and crosses out the o, the n, the i, the o, and the n in onion from the remaining letters in acorn, pin and moo]... Now we add a dollar and subtract three cents. So, that leaves 97... What've we got left?  Lois: P, M, O, 97. Clark: P, M, O, 97. [he writes them below the alternating adding and subtracting line as he repeats them]... Let's kick that around a little bit. PMO97 doesn't seem to mean anything. What about M, P, O, 97? Inspector: Don't look at me; I flunked simple arithmetic. Clark: What about P, O, 97? Let's leave the M out for a moment?.   Lois: Well, it could be Post Office 97, either a box or a substation. Clark: Good Girl! [he writes it off to the side] Lois: It is a box. Post Office Box 97, Main branch. Clark: That's right. There's something at Post Office box 97 at the Main Branch that Martin has gone to a lot of trouble to get.  Lois: What are we sitting here for? He's got the key. Clark: Because the Post Office doesn't open until seven o'clock in the morning.  Inspector: And I'll be there first to help Martin open that box. Inspector Henderson is there when Martin opens the Post Office box. Inside of the box is a package. Inside of the package is a huge stolen ruby.

Confessions of a Nazi Spy ('39)      Blackball Cartoon  '92

"Mystery of the Broken Statues," has the look and feel of Korean War era government training films I saw ten years after the ceasefire in high school R.O.T.C. Some of them were, in fact, produced during that war or earlier — and good luck on finding a bio of the script writer "William C. Joyce."  Wherever Clark Kent's blackboard presentation of how to break a picture code originated, he did it the way a military instructor would do it or show a class how it's done in a government training film. The entire episode, as is, would be a splendid teaching aid for any U.S. government class in basic cryptology. 

John Hamilton, the actor who plays Clark Kent's editor on the Daily Planet is such an instructor in Espionage Agent ('39). He's an FBI supervisor confronted with a Nazi code name on a proposal to kidnap an Air Corps colonel  in Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Although he is not represented as Perry White in "The Mystery of the Broken Statues" episode of Superman, he is represented by the "Inspector" title of the police detective and the car drawn in chalk. In twelve 1931 and '32  S.S. Van Dime Mystery movie shorts, John Hamilton is Police Inspector Carr.

Clark uses an alternating addition and subtraction rule that would have shown up in a real puzzle of this kind as + and - symbols where they apply; not as a rule. Clark makes it seem as though all rebus puzzles are solved with invisible pluses and minuses the way he does it  by calling the rebus "a code" and then saying, "Here's how it works...." 

Well, it doesn't work with the acorn, pin, car, moo, onion and money in a different order. It doesn't work with a different word for the cow (like bovine, milk or dairy"?) or the safety pin. Clark's performance is, itself, a trick. He doesn't show how he determined the order in which the items in the statuettes had to be lined up for his plus and minus rule to choose the few relevant letters and numbers by eliminating the many irrelevant ones.

Only three letters and two numerals count in the recovery of the ruby. The logic of hiding them in many other letters and alternate possible meanings for the cow,  pen, and money zooms into focus within a minute or so of isolating the M P O and 97. The rebus has thus become an anagram. There are only so many ways they can be arranged to make sense with the brass key standing for a brass key like the PIZZA stands for a PIZZA in Fuhrman's fifth Bundy note.

The proposition that Clark Kent's pictogram was lifted from a real government cryptology exercise gets a functional endorsement of sorts from Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 1939. The movie was based on the unauthorized publication of former FBI Agent Leon G. Turrou's counter-espionage work. Most importantly, with respect to Edward G. Robinson's role in the movie and John Hamilton's, he was the Confessions of a Nazi Spy technical advisor. Turrou, "Joyce" and the technical advisor for the "Mystery of the Broken Statues" episode of Superman had enough in common to be Turrou or someone who studied his work on the movie closely.

Confessions of a Nazi Spy serves up every item in Clark Kent's picture puzzle; an acorn, a safety pin, a car, a cow, an onion, a dollar bill, 3 cents and a key. But to see all of them, you have to put yourself in 1951 TV Land (when "Mystery of the Broken Statues" was made). You have to know what Confessions of a Nazi Spy has in common with The Three Stooges and a popular cartoon bird. You also have to know something about that bird not revealed to the public until the 1970s. It's a classic case of mapping where ideas chiefly from one source are transplanted into another.

Superman ACORN  (ACORN)

Confessions of a Nazi Spy: Grace Stafford is the acorn. She was married to Walter Lantz, the co-creator of the Woody Woodpecker cartoon character in 1940. Woody is an ACORN woodpecker. Only people close to Grace Stafford knew that she became a voce of Woody in 1951. She kept it secret for decades. 

Superman  SAFETY PIN  (PIN)

Confessions of a Nazi Spy / Sock-A-Bye-Baby: All pin-on badges like a U.S. customs inspector's or a German Iron Cross, have safety pin attachments. An explicit "safety pen" showed up in a Google search for an onion link to a Nazi." I hit the jackpot with a line from MOE HOWARD of The Three Stooges in Sock-A-Bye-Baby, a 1942  Columbia short subject. Moe uses dozens of safety pins to make pants from a tablecloth for an abandoned baby. The safety pin "operation" impressed me as being a valid link to Superman and Confessions of a Nazi Spy when I noticed how close MOE was to MOO, how easy it was to get by adding Howard and subtracting letters the way Clark Kent did, how I got there by way of a "Nazi onion" and a "kidnap" car chase at the end. pin, car, moo, onion, Columbia + 3 = Mystery of the Broken Statues and Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

Sock-A-Bye-Baby is a mental salad bowl for mixing Clark Kent pictogram ingredients from Confessions of a Nazi Spy. It names two of them (safety pin and onion) and shows how to add and subtract letters to get another (MOO).

Superman CAR (CAR) Lois Lane is whisked away in her kidnappers' car to get the key for a Post Office box.

Confessions of a Nazi Spy: To be relevant to the "Mystery of the Broken Statues" picture puzzle, something about a particular car in Confessions of a Nazi Spy has to tie into that Adventures of Superman episode... A man sitting in the back seat of a military car on an Army air base is Col. Austin, the commanding officer of a Fort. He is the object of an intercepted uuencoded  kidnapping proposal. You can't see the colonel. You can see his car.

Superman COW (MOO)

Confessions of a Nazi Spy: German espionage agent Hilda Kleinhauer is a true believer in Adolph Hitler's National Socialist party. On her last trip to The United States she gets tripped up by "Sword," the German-American Nazi who cooked up the disastrous kidnapping plan. Sword informs or her to FBI Agent Renard. She spills the beans on Dr. Kassel, the number one Nazi in America. In an unrestrained show of temper he calls her a, "...stupid cow!"

Superman ONION  (ONION)

Confessions of a Nazi Spy: You can spell onion in a deleted letter code you can make with a small portion of a  Nazi telegram [...Newyork (NY) = important...] But a better picture for an onion is Adolph Hitler. His favorite dish was onion soup. He ordered onion soup at his favorite restaurants. The point is made indirectly with Nazis eating in German restaurants and Moe Howard in Sock-A-Bye-Baby trying to subdue an onion. It squirts him in his eye. He says to the onion, "Double-crosser! Nazi onion, aye!" and throws it away.

Superman DOLLAR  ($1.00)

Confessions of a Nazi Spy: Dollars and cents changes hands. They appear on bar and restaurant menus, but in only one scene does a dollar bill stand alone. A Nazi spy codenamed Sword is trying to pick up a package he thinks contains blank American passports. He waits across the street from Queens Tavern where it is delivered by a Western Union messenger on a bicycle. Sword pays a shoeshine boy to get it for him. He pulls out three dollars, gives the boy two of them and puts the other dollar bill in his coat pocket.

Superman 3 PENNIES (3¢)

Confessions of a Nazi Spy: The dollar in the Clark Kent code stood for the number 100. The  3 pennies serve the same function. You have to subtract 3 from 100 to get 97. You could knock yourself out trying to find three pennies that aren't in the movie until it hits you that three of these (¢) will get you there. The prices on the Tavern and across the street from it have several ¢'s. You can pick three of them or you can find something represents a 3-cent value of the time like the Statue of Liberty. The 3¢ Liberty postage stamp held its First Class value from 1932 to 1958.

Superman KEY 

Confessions of a Nazi Spy: The kidnapping proposal letter has a code name that a British official reads to his American counterpart over the phone. The code name "Sword" begins the unraveling of the whole Nazi spy ring network in America.  The lead FBI finds a sheet of symbols that had to be some kind of code. He demands the "key," to the code. She tells him that she doesn't have it but another FBI man finds a clock in her suitcase and the code key on a smaller sheet of paper inside the clock The FBI man in charge finds another one on the inside cover of a Dr. Kassel's match book.     

Superman: PO97M Post Office 97

Confessions of a Nazi Spy:  Voiceover: "Because of a postman's curiosity, British Military Intelligence discovers that Mrs. MacLauchlin is the European Post Office for a Nazi spy ring that spreads over the whole world.

Army Major Williams comes to the FBI for help in tracking down the man who signed his name Sword on the kidnap proposal letter to the "Nazi Post Office." In the sequence of screenshots below, the FBI chief's lead investigator Ed Renard comes to his desk with the letter and gets right to the heart of things. He says, "I told you I thought this man was an amateur. If he is, why did he become a spy? Well, because he's been listening to speeches and reading pamphlets about Nazi Germany and believing them. Unfortunately there are thousands like him in America. Half-witted, hysterical crackpots who go Hitler happy from over-indulgence in propaganda that makes them believe they are supermen. American Nazi organizations, that's where we'll find your man Sword, Maj. Williams."  

 The FBI man sitting behind the desk is John Hamilton. He also sits behind a desk as Perry White in Superman.

High Points               Superman                    Nazi Medals                   Anagrams                  Home Page