Short Cut to Hell

In 1936, seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp. The Nazis put up seven crosses for demonstrative executions. This story about one of the fugitives, who relies on own courage and compassion of people to avoid the seventh cross.

Following a news report that a fabulous jewel collection, called "Unclaimed Cargo", will be on display at the Waldorf Jewelry Company, a city alderman and secret underworld gang leader, Nick Petzik (Peter Brocco), plans a gigantic jewel robbery. Petzik intends to sell the jewels back to the insurance company; and to force the insurance company to play ball with him, Petzik enlists the aid of Gino Morello ('Richard Benedict'), a young and reckless Italian boy, whose brother Phil (Rick Vallin') is the lawyer for the insurance company. Petzik is sure that once Phil learns that his brother is one of the thieves, he will do business with the gang without asking any questions. But...Anna Reichardt (Penny Edwards (I)'), an Austrian girl, who runs a pastry shop on the ground floor of the Morello apartment building...is a witness to the robbery and spots Gino as one of the robbers. Complications arise.

Railroaded to an insane asylum twenty years ago by four men who had taken over his newspaper, Lucius Marplay, publisher of the London Sun, escapes with the sole intent of murdering the men responsible for his plight - Mark Peters, Sinclair Ellis, Nigel Partridge and Ambrose Craven. One by one, their advance obituaries appear in print, giving the exact day and hour on their impending deaths. And each future-obit becomes true for all but Peters. Also working on the case are Joan Marplay, the daughter who thought her father dead until his escape, and Noel Stretton, the star columnist for the 'Sun.' Plus, a strange character with a Scottish accent, Alastair MacNab, being on the scene at just the right time. Strangely enough, The London Tribune, continues to scoop the 'Sun' on the murders within its own building.

After the German administrator of Czechia is shot, his assassin tries to elude the Gestapo and struggles with his impulse to give himself up as hostages are executed.

Bill Dietrich becomes a double agent for the F.B.I. in a German spy ring.

Dr. Lawrence Baxter, working with the Bureau of Pure Foods and Drugs, uses radio broadcasts to expose a number of fraudulent patient medicines, with his bitterest attacks being aimed at Kennedy Radium Products the manufacturer of a tonic called 'Radium Rejuvenating Tablets," which Baxter claims is a slow cause of death. This leads the manufacturer to try every means to defeat and discredit the young doctor.