The Silent Command

A British spy is banished to Panama after having an affair with an ambassador's mistress. Once there he makes connection with a local tailor with a nefarious past and connections to all of the top political and gangster figures in Panama. The tailor also has a wife, who works for the Panamanian president and a huge debt. The mission is to learn what the President intends to do with the Canal.

Five shorts spanning a century on lives impacted by the Panama Canal. Men, women and children who are influenced by the existence of the "Canal", the event that changed the history of not only a country but the world.

Rick Leland makes no secret of the fact he has no loyalty to his home country after he is court-martialed out of the army and boards a Japanese ship for the Orient in late 1941. But has Leland really been booted out, or is there some other motive for his getting close to fellow passenger Doctor Lorenz? Any motive for getting close to attractive traveler Alberta Marlow would however seem pretty obvious.

Confined to his Tahitian hut by the French colonial authorities in 1903, the painter Paul Gauguin is forced to paint a new masterpiece to save his five-year-old native son, while battling illness and torn between madness and sanity. In the course of these events, memories of the past, especially of his life and work at the Panama Canal, the place where his artistic career began and his guilt at abandoning his family in Paris, begin to haunt him.

Butch Rogers and Sock McGillis are old submarine hands stationed in Panama. On land, Butch and Sock battle over pretty Ann Sawyer. At sea and underwater, however, our two heroes are inseparable.