The Devil Pays Off
1941 film by John H. Auer
The Devil Pays Off is a 1941 American spy thriller film directed by John H. Auer and starring J. Edward Bromberg, Osa Massen and William Wright. It was produced and distributed by Republic Pictures. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound Recording (Charles L. Lootens).
Plot
The former naval lieutenant Chris Waring is awakened by the police late time and delivered to Admiral Curtiss, his former commander. The admiral asks Waring for his support in an undercover operation. The op is about the shipowner Arnold Debrock, who sold ships to the United States but later got manipulated by enemy powers in a mysterious way. Since Curtiss knows that Chris is successful with women, he asks him to flirt with Debrocks's wife Valerie Avancen. Chris initially refuses to participate, but he changes his opinion in a short while after seeing Valerie boarding a ship to Havana and takes up the pursuit of the beautiful woman.
He actually succeeds in flirting viciously with Valerie and to get her to go with him to his cabin. There, however, they both meet, for Chris's great surprise, Joan Millard, the Admiral Curtiss's secretary.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Devil Pays Off” is 1941 film by John H. Auer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Devil, Pays and film, not as a finished interpretation.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7729981. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Devil Pays Off” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.