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Reviews
3 Steps to the Gallows (1953)
Fist fight club
In this entertainingly convoluted crime movie, sailor Scot Brady has to punch his his way around various London locations in order to prove that his brother is innocent of the murder that will send him to hang that week, He is befriended by a series of characters, virtually all of whom are part of the gang that framed his brother, who then, having helped him get too close to the truth, have to arrange to have him beaten up, arrested for murder and/or killed. Fortunately for our hero the heavy mob prove to be repeatedly incompetent in fist fights, in cars that aim to run him down but miss, and by an assassin with a rifle who takes one shot (which also misses), and then runs away, The police inspector, who knows from the start that our man is telling the truth, nonetheless ( when seeming to suspect him of murder) leaves him free to wander about risking his life in order to flush out Mr Big. The villains seem to be one step ahead at all times, always turning up in the right place without having any way of knowing it, but then bungling their one task yet again. Twist upon twist occur until, conveniently, the entire cast descend on a trade fair and the cops can nab the gang as a job lot in what is a rather rushed ending.
It is one of those 'don't ask too many questions' films otherwise the plot logic might collapse - why do the villains even pretend to help him? When they do finally overpower him and beat him senseless, why do they then soak him in whiskey rather than just finish him off? How do they switch the gramophone record when no one saw him stash it away? That aside, and forgiving a few obligatory tropes of the genre - the villain who fronts a night club, the club singer/love interest, the thugs who wear the overcoats that thugs wear etc, - it moves along at speed and is never dull.
Echo of Diana (1963)
Confused.com
The version of this film I saw was an incomprehensible ragbag of unexplained scenes, with the 'explanation' of the plot at the end being perfunctory and only adding to the confusion - perhaps there was a reel or two missing? It seems (I could be wrong) that Mrs Scott was being kidnapped in order to exchange her for her double-agent husband? If so, why didn't they simply kidnap her (they seemed to do whatever they liked), rather than go through all the rigmarole of faked break-ins, roping in the journalist Pam Jennings for no reason, using all that cloak and dagger business with the 'eagle' code and so on - they could have just snatched her off the street, or from her flat, as the security experts didn't appear to have her under surveillance despite fearing that she would be nabbed at any moment. Did 'Harris' appear in the film - he is credited in the cast but I must have missed him? How did they find that abandoned car, and where did it lead them? Wilson , who died in the mini crash, had forgotten to change his address - what? The woman from the newspaper office was working for the security people, and then phoned someone to pass on Pam Jennings' address, after which a 'copper' stops Jennings in her car park and checks her address - what's going on there? And who killed the newspaper woman and why? (I think they said it was Harris). Too many loose ends and illogical activity. I am totally prepared to accept that I simply wasn't paying proper attention, but if someone could give a coherent account of what actually happened, and why, I'd be grateful.
Mark of the Phoenix (1958)
Dull and confusing.
This largely uninteresting crime caper is not helped by a confusingly hard to follow plot. Three villains steal a sample of some special metal product, and have it turned into a cigarette case in order to be able to smuggle it abroad to Europe's enemies without arousing suspicion. This metal will be used to damage Europe's military defences, or something like that, it doesn't really matter, it's a macguffin. They shoot the scientist who has invented it, and make a clumsy attempt to make it look like suicide. A fourth villain then leaves the case in the hotel room of an American jewel thief (conveniently, no one locks their room in this hotel). I never worked out why he did this - perhaps there was a reel missing? Then it gets really hard to know what is going on - the various villains do deals with each other involving jewellery and the coveted case, cheat on each other, have punch ups and/or kill each other. Those still standing at the end get arrested, apart from the American thief, who for some unexplained reason the police allow to leave (though not before he openly passes a stolen necklace to the love interest, Petra, who spends most of the movie saying 'I don't understand' to everyone she meets - I know the feeling). Irrationalities abound - a villain tries to steal the case from the hotel room but has to have a fist fight first - he has a gun, but only uses it to fire a wasted shot as he is running away without the thing he came for. Another villain is interrogated by the original three for some vital information, but they shoot him before he can tell them. The American leaves the hotel with a suitcase but doesn't have it when he gets to the airport. Petra appears to play no useful function in the plot, other than to not understand it. The police do not much, but catch the gang anyway. Not a great film, but not bad enough to be enjoyable.
Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945)
Dated melodrama
Murder ensues when two worlds collide in Victorian Brighton. In one corner is the terribly, terribly, British household of the Sutton family, ruled by heart of stone, God-fearing stickler of a father, Mervyn Johns, where things are 'jolly nice', or 'jolly beastly', the maid gets one afternoon off a month, and the uniformly wet offspring do as they are told or will suffer the consequences. On the whole, the Suttons are jolly dull, but more interesting possibilities are found in the Dolphin pub, home of gin-swilling loose women, men on the make, and a violent drunkard of a landlord who beats his flighty wife, Googie Withers. Into this alternative world strays the Sutton's eldest son, Gordon Jackson, the Scottish wing of the family, who, deterred from his pursuit of love and poetry by Victorian parent, takes pity on Googie, and inadvertently tells her how to poison her husband using strychnine available from the family pharmacy shop. Once the deed is done, Googie tries to implicate poor old Gordon Jackson to save her own skin, but Sutton Senior comes good, driving Googie to suicide on a clifftop on Brighton seafront that no-one else knew existed. Dated, very slow in places, and a rushed ending.
The Teckman Mystery (1954)
Impenetrable plot.
Incredibly convoluted Francis Durbridge mystery whose revelation of the chief villain at the end undoes much of the logic of what has gone before. Trying to piece together a coherent summary of the plot, explaining who did what, and for what purpose is virtually impossible. It's one of those films where people seem to wander in and out of each other's flat at will, the hero has a comedy manservant, the heroine is permanently dressed for a ball at some posh venue, nobody asks obvious questions, or accepts unconvincing answers if they do ask, and character motivations appear to change without reason. For example, we discover that Margaret Leighton is on the side of the baddies, some kind of foreign spy outfit, whose motivation from reel one is to get John Justin out of the way before he discovers their secret. They trap him into flying to Berlin, where he will clearly meet his fate, yet it is Leighton's tip to the police that rescues him?? There's lots of guff with notes, and assignations, and mystery men hanging about on street corners to no apparent purpose. Towards the end the police ask for Justin's help in catching the villain, and this involves taking her out to lunch, for reasons best kept to themselves. And then, of course, they let him tag along with them as they head for the final showdown, as coppers in this kind of caper are obliged to do so that the hero can be in at the death. There's an attempt at a touch of Hitchcock in the denouement at the Tower of London involving some nuns, then the Leighton character flees up the stairs of another tower (of course she does), and you immediately know that she won't be using the stairs to come down, instead falling from a great height when she briefly touches the flimsiest wall possible. Sort of entertaining, but don't expect it to make any sense.
Daybreak (1948)
Dull and implausible
I can only assume that all the interesting and believable parts of this film were cut by the censor, as what's left doesn't work at all. Eddie, a middle-aged, uncharismatic barge business owner/barber and part-time hangman, has a chance meeting with young, attractive loner, Frankie, who appears to have some kind of past from which she is escaping. On Sunday they go to the cinema, and on their third meeting Eddie says 'will you marry me?' and she says 'yes, I love you very much.' At this point you immediately have trouble taking anything that follows seriously, since the central relationship is so absurdly implausible. Once married, Frankie is transformed into a happy-go-lucky housewife (bargewife actually,) with a new vitality, and a new accent (accents, in general, are not among this film's strengths). Eddie hands over his barber shop to his colleague Ron, and concentrates on the barge business, and a bit of hanging people on the side, unknown to Frankie. Trouble arrives in the form of Danish sailor, Olaf, handsome and lustful, who exploits Eddie's hanging absences by seducing Frankie, who might be realising that she's married a geriatric dullard who doesn't float her boat. Eddie returns early one evening, doesn't like what he sees, and takes Olaf on deck to give the bounder a good thrashing. After the obligatory punch-up, Eddie is pushed overboard, and can't be found. The police arrive, and treat Frankie as a suspect despite the fact that witnesses have just described how they saw the whole thing. The police go on deck, and Frankie takes the opportunity to shoot herself, as she can't believe she got involved with such a terrible script. The next morning, Eddie emerges onto the shore, having somehow survived a night in the Thames, and by this time his 'murder', and the arrest of Olaf, is already news in the papers. Olaf must hang, but Eddie can't go through with it, and instead decides to hang himself, and thinks that his barber friend Ron would appreciate it if he was the one to find the body hanging in his shop the next morning.
I find it astonishing that anyone can take this film seriously, let alone give it 10 starts. Nothing about is credible, it's slow-moving (not in a good way). lacks any kind of tension or drama, Eric Portman and Anne Todd do their best in thankless parts, Maxwell Read hams it up as the ne'er-do-well Olaf, and the rest of the cast are stereotypes, from cardboard coppers to the 'salt of the earth' barmaid. But the biggest flaw of the lot is the fact that the story is told in flashback by Eddie, who manages to describe events at which he was not present, and knew nothing about - did nobody spot this huge anomaly during production.
If this were a quota quickie, you half expect al these endearing gaffes, but this film seemed to have higher ambitions. Let's blame the censor.
Cover Girl Killer (1959)
Steptoe in disguise.
AS others have said, the best thing about this film is Harry H Corbett showing he was a more versatile actor than his later pigeon-holing suggested. Those glasses are ridiculous though. The rest is fairly routine B movie fare, including the commonly used trope of the police inexplicably allowing a member of the public to tag along with their enquiries, and share evidence with him. This is made all the more absurd since, in this case, he's actually a Person of Interest, but such films need this device in order that the hero can be in on the finale (by which time he's telling the police what to do!) The villain's actions don't always make logical sense, but it's only an hour of your time.
The Steel Key (1953)
He's not The Saint, he's a very naughty boy ...
Watchable nonsense of the 'don't ask too many questions' variety. The plot is hard to follow since characters motivations and objectives seem to change, and it's also one of those films where normal, rational behaviour can't occur because it would derail the plot. Early on, the 'hero' - he's after the valuable papers for himself - watches the largely hopeless henchman cut the heroine's brakes; when her car crashes, she doesn't seem to be curious enough to ask 'who tampered with my brakes?', and just accepts it as a routine event. Some scenes appear to have no purpose - the villains go to a boat to search for the coveted papers, open one drawer, and then say 'come on,. let's go..' and off they go again. And did I mis-hear it or does the real Dr Metcalf say at one point that he had found the body of the murdered boffin, and rescued the charred papers from the fire, and later on, when he thinks he's being accused of that murder, he says 'I was in Philadelphia at the time.' ? And what's he doing in that final scene anyway - it's another common trope of the B movie crime story that the police take witnesses, and waifs and strays, around with them as they try to catch criminals. There's a farcical scene near the finale where all the key players pile into a posh house through the French windows from the drive. The suspect escapes through the door leading to the rest of the house, and locks it behind him, and the police waste time yanking at a door that is clearly not going to open, yet all they have to do is turn around and go back out through the door they just entered by, about six feet away. The hero drives to Newhaven, but somehow the police know that's where he's going, and follow. In films like this characters know things that they had no way of knowing. Anyway, on the boat the hero has a fist fight with three different villains, who conveniently take it in turns to fight him so that he has a better chance, and the one with the gun, of course, can't shoot straight, then the rest of the cast show up for a Poirot style explanation, the hero nabs the precious papers, the sale of which will fund his impending marriage to the girl he met the day before yesterday. Formulaic hokum, and Sam Kydd too.
River Beat (1954)
Routine fare, but nicely shot.
So-so quota quickie. typical of its type, whose plot has been well covered in other reviews, so just a few things to add. Great location work around docklands, and nearby parts of 50s London, and I didn't think it paced itself too badly. On the down side, though the plot itself is reasonably coherent, there's plenty that doesn't quite ring true, in line with films of the genre. There's the villain with his much younger moll, whom he appears to treat as a slave, so that he never has to leave his seat - she even holds the phone for him while talks into it. There's the Mr Big, who, as soon as he pulls out a gun, you just know he's going to the world's worst shot, and will bungle his advantage. There's the final, frantic ten minutes, in which there will be a chase and a fist fight, the hero will when and then....well you know what's next, There seemed to a law for such films that there has be an implausible whirlwind romance between the two lead characters. and, when these two meet by chance for the first time in a bar, you know that they will declare their love for each other about half an hour later (okay, maybe two days later, but having spent no more than about half an hour together during those two days.). Perhaps that's what the viewing public wanted in those days, I just want to be surprised one day by a film like this in which the cops get the baddies despite the two leads not being able to stand the sight of each other. Anyway, it's a watchable hour, if only for the look of it.
The House in Marsh Road (1960)
Neither one thing nor the other
Average little cheapo which is an odd hybrid of standard 'husband plots wife's murder to get his hands on her valuable, recently inherited house' scenario, and a semi-comic sub-plot featuring a largely benign ghost, nicknamed Patrick, who haunts the house in question. Patrick's interventions are mischievous, though he does turn nasty when evil's afoot. The problem is that the ghost's input into the film is neither comic enough to be comedy, nor spooky enough to be spooky, so the plot could function without it, just requiring another way for the villains to get their comeuppance (which is the only real purpose for Patrick to be in it).
The inherited house has rescued Jean and David (Patricia Dianton and Tony Wright) from a life of unpaid bills, living in temporary digs, and scraping by as best they can. The house is worth a few thousand, David wants to sell it, Jean wants to live in it, and there's the problem. David is an unspeakable cad, trying to write a novel, but boozing it up instead most of the time, and mostly living off Jean. When he meets sexy Valerie (Sandra Dorne) the die is cast, and Jean will have to be bumped off so that he and his new love can get the house. But Patrick protects his owner with timely interventions, and then unleashes his full power on the scheming couple at the end. There's some clunky dialogue, Valerie's character has a strange moral code which doesn't allow her to be seduced until her divorce has come through, but lets her jump straight into David's marital bed as soon as it has, and encourages him to commit murder. The big mystery is why any woman would fall for this snake, let alone two of them. The film as a whole is neither one thing or the other, but it's harmless enough.
Serena (1962)
Twist gets the plot in a knot
Serena is one of those films that, once all is revealed at the end, it is quite difficult to reconstruct coherently. True, there is a twist in the tail, but I think it creates contradictions in the plot. Let's tell the story with the benefit of hindsight.
Howard and his lover, Serena, want to murder his wealthy estranged wife, Ann. On the day of the murder they drive a long way from Ann's home to shoot pigeons, and there is witness to this.At some point, Serena sneaks off in Howard's car, drives to Ann's house and shoots her in the face, and drives back. Later, Howard tells the police that the dead body is not Ann, because there is a birth mark missing - her face is damaged beyond recognition. Then, Serena changes her appearance, and re-emerges as Ann, inventing (for the police) an old friend, Claire, who was staying at the cottage with her on the day of the shooting, who looked a bit like Ann, and was wearing Ann's clothes (don't ask). 'Ann' also invents a mysterious woman in a green coat who has been following her recently, and this woman matches the description of the now missing Serena. So, the police theory now is that Serena tried to murder Ann, killed Claire by mistake, and may make another attempt on Ann's life. They stay on the wrong scent until a wig fragment provides the clue that foils the plot.
So, the plan seems to be that Serena will continue to impersonate Ann until she gets access to Ann's fortune. This would rely on 'Ann' meeting no-one who knew the real Ann, and this is surely a bit of a long shot? And surely there are photos of the real Ann at her home, which the police would find? Why not just kill Ann, without defacing her - wouldn't Howard just inherit the money as her next of kin? Also, when Howard and Serena/Ann are alone together, they continue to talk and behave as potential murder victim and concerned husband - they don't need to do this when no-one else is around, and would have quite different conversations. And, at the end, 'Ann' goes to a Catholic church (Ann was Catholic) - why does she do this, she doesn't know she's being followed? One other little thing - when the police want 'Ann's' alibi for the time of the shooting, she shows them receipts from London shops, which seem to satisfy them that she was elsewhere: how's that explained?
It's a short and sweet way to spend an hour, just a bit too tricksy for my liking.
Smokescreen (1964)
Unassuming, but effective
A modest, but quietly effective story of an insurance assessor (the ever reliable Peter Vaughn) investigating a possibly suspicious claim following the plunging of a car over a Brighton clifftop. Vaughn is first class as the dogged, brolly-carrying Roper, on screen virtually throughout, as he questions everything and trusts no-one. It has the feel of a police procedural, and there is some wry humour derived from his reluctance to spend money, and to fiddle his expenses at every opportunity, for the best of reasons, we discover. A stalwart supporting cast keep things real, and there are nice location shots. Worth an hour of anyone's time.
Blind Corner (1964)
Surprise ending saves the day (a bit).
An incredibly slow moving plot, where nothing happens for what seems like hours, is somewhat salvaged by a disarming final twenty minutes or so, where we find out that things are not what they seem. Adulterous wife, Anne, of blind composer, Paul, openly flaunts her affair with Ricky, a painter of unsaleable art works. She wants Paul's money, and tells Ricky that their affair is over unless he agrees to bump Paul off in order to fund their future together. But it turns out that Ricky is an even more incompetent murderer than he is a painter, so Paul survives and explains the plot to him. Ricky is actually a stooge, set up by Anne to take the rap for the murder, while she and her true lover, Mike, take off with the loot - she and Mike have kept up an act of mutual antipathy in all public appearances as cover for their affair. Anyway, Paul outsmarts them, and the police nab the villains.
Okay, so the ending creates some unexpected interest, but you wonder whether the revelation of Anne's affair with Mike rather undoes the logic of what's gone before. For example, why does Mike need to pretend to Paul that he saw Anne and Ricky in a restaurant together - the lovers' plan does not require that Paul knows anything about the affair, they only need Ricky to believe that Anne plans a future with him once Paul is dead? Also, as far as we see, Anne spends every available minute away from Paul, on various phoney pretexts, having sex with Ricky, and Mike is meant to be okay with that is he? We have no idea when Anne and Mike are getting their quality time together, so in this sense the film doesn't really play fair with the viewer. And, if the 'perfect murder' plan is plausible enough to convince Ricky, why not just do the deed themselves, and save Anne all the wasted time, and sex, with a man she has no interest in?
A competent cast do their jobs largely convincingly, just a shame about the needless Ronnie Carrol, and those hideous songs.
The Girl in the Picture (1957)
Humdrum quota quickie
Bog standard cheapo thriller featuring all the tropes of its type. No one locks their doors in these films so the villains are able to come and go as they please in any building they choose, and the plot can move along quickly. There's fair amount of expository dialogue, and characters have to speak out loud some clunky lines, and some, especially poor Junia Crawford express surprise by repeating what's just been said - 'Jack was involved in a robbery', 'A robbery?' 'Yes. and then a murder', 'A murder?' 'Jack's dead', 'Dead?' and so on. The journalist hero is always head of the police, who send a bobby to watch a suspect's garage, who abandons his post to find a call box to ring in with 'nothing happening here, sir', allowing the villain to stroll in unseen and do his murderous deed. At the end, damsel in distress, Pat, is trapped in her flat with the murderer (having not only not locked her door, but left it wide open), the goodies arrive en masse, there's punch up, and villain walks backwards over a fire escape, and all is well. In its defence the 'mistake' cited in the 'goofs' section actually isn't a goof - the script makes one character unwittingly mis-name a block of flats as a plot device to delay the police.
The Quiet Woman (1951)
Dull Sussex crime story.
Amiable, time-passing B movie of little merit but for some nice location shots in my locality. It features all the usual hallmarks of the cheapo quickie - some clunky dialogue, improbable plot developments, and an uninspiring romance at the centre. Anodyne, new-coming country innkeeper Jane (Jane Hylton) falls for equally anodyne smuggler/artist/ex-naval officer Duncan (Derek Bond). It gets complicated with the arrival of dominatrix Helen (Diane Foster), his former lover, who immediately treats Duncan's sidekick Lefty (Michael Balfour) and barmaid Elsie (Dora Bryan) as her persona slaves, and they seem happy to let her. She sets out to sabotage the budding romance, and is assisted when Jane's escaped convict husband Jim (Harry Towb) turns up, demanding that Jane shelters him, or else he will tell the police that she's been hiding him for days. On the basis of this absurd threat Jane agrees, and hides him in the attic (actually just another room on the same landing as the guests bedrooms). Helen spills the beans, Duncan and Lefty smuggle Jim to the coast, pursued by customs man Bromley (John Horsley) and Jane, who gets there just as quickly on foot as Bromley does in his car with a head start, and then we have a boat chase across the channel, a punch-up, and a frankly ridiculous demise when Jim is hit in the sea by a crew-less boat which he makes no attempt to avoid. It's all good, unlikely fun, the cast spend a lot of their time in the pub, which appears to have virtually no other customers, it all ends well for the loving couple, and you can enjoy the scenery.
Jigsaw (1962)
A quiet treat.
Jigsaw is a fine example of the 'no frills' police procedural - there are no car chases, no fist fights, not a gun in sight, and not even a music soundtrack, or background music of any kind. What we get instead is a murder mystery investigated by old-fashioned policemen, methodically following every minute lead with dogged persistence in an attempt to piece it all together. An apparently trivial burglary in an estate agent's Brighton office, leads to the discovery of a dismembered body in a remote coastal house, and Jack Warner's team of coppers begin their time-consuming search for both the victim's identity and the killer, a search in which we learn the facts along with them, and so the film plays it fair with the audience. The cast are uniformly effective - including Ronald Lewis, Michael Goodliffe, John Barron and many others - though Yolande Donlan's slightly hysterical antics are rather jarring. There are many nice shots of 60s Brighton locations, and a brief scene in Greenwich near to the Cutty Sark.
Despite the lack of any kind of conventional action - it's all footwork, phone calls, interviews and the like - the pace never slackens, the script avoids clichés and other irritants, and the plot makes sense. An excellent, modest, crime story to enjoy.
Danger by My Side (1962)
Baddies do bad things, and get caught.
Routine, 'get what you pay for' cops and robbers cheapie, featuring all the usual clichés, plot holes, and cardboard characters that you would expect. Lyn Marsden (Maureen Connell), avenging her copper brother's death, goes undercover in the villains habitats. Fortunately, this turns out be unbelievably easy since, as soon as she arrives at their dodgy night club, she bumps into the manager, Sam (Bill Nagy), who offers her a job virtually immediately. The job is so non-specific that she is able to do it by sitting at the bar, and flirting with Mr Big (Alan Tilvern), while the clientele are entertained by exotic singers and dancers who are as exotic and talented as Butlin's Redcoats. There is, of course, a clueless detective in the background, telling Lyn that she shouldn't be mixing with these hard men, whilst happily letting her do it. The dead copper - killed in the most unconvincing hit and run you will see - had also been working undercover with the baddies, yet all the info Lyn unearths seems to be news to the plods. Anyway, teetotal Sam becomes a drunkard when Lyn gets friendly with the boss, then her cover gets blown and she is tied up on a boat, the boss decides it's time to flee, the cops converge on the boat, there is a fist fight, and the baddies shop each other, confess, and get arrested. Done and dusted in an hour, nothing makes too much sense, but you've seen plenty like it.
Port Afrique (1956)
Husband finds new love, and a new leg, after tragic death of wife.
Nicely shot, but tedious turkey of a film with obvious risible attempts to echo Casablanca: the north African setting, the cynical hero (who I spent most of it thinking was called Rick, but it turned out to be Rip), with an ambivalent relationship with the chief of police, dodgy villains in the Kasbah, beautiful love interest Pier Angeli, and night club scenes etc. Rip returns from war with an artificial leg, giving him a limp which improves as time goes by, to find a dead wife, and a range of suspects who might have killed her. There are a number of pointless characters, several unexplained attempts to kill Rip, or rough him up, an intergalactically daft script, and a plot so ponderous that you could leave the room for twenty minutes, more than once, and not miss anything. Some well known faces come in and out of the plot without adding any interest, so let's not list them here: it's all about Rip, a leading man so deeply dull that you hope that somebody will succeed in shooting him. The story covers about two days, after which Rip, having mourned for his late wife for about half an hour, can take off with his new love, and his restored leg. Absolute drivel. Rest in Peace Rip.
The Reptile (1966)
Utter rubbish.
I'm astonished that so many people rave about this total garbage. Did they see the same film? I agree that it has a mostly decent cast, but the material they are given to work with? I mean, how many clichés do you want? The remote setting, in a village that has no doctor, the local pub where the regulars literally walk out every time the newcomers walk in (and poor Michael Ripper has to say, out loud, the line 'they don't like strangers in these parts'), the inexplicably unfriendly squire, with vivacious daughter and sinister manservant, the standard pretty wife, Jennifer Daniel, who makes her husband, Ray Barrett, promise that he will never leave her alone in their spooky new home, and you know that is exactly what he will do frequently, a reptile monster in a ridiculous latex mask, whose behaviour is never explained coherently, the newcomer's house being utterly ransacked without any discernible reason (and restored in about three minutes), scenes that serve no purpose, and so on, and so on. I don't mind a bit of low-budget horror, but you at least expect that the plot will make some kind of sense. One reviewer referred to the brief part of a murder victim at the start being played by Harold Pinter - I think you'll find that actor is a different David Baron (Pinter's stage name), known for his Dr Who-type performances. Pinter wouldn't have gone anywhere near this drivel.
Time Is My Enemy (1954)
Unlikely plot
Routine B&W cheapie based on the implausible premise that a remarried woman (Renee Ascherson) would allow herself to be blackmailed by her crooked first husband (Dennis Price), long since declared dead in the blitz, who turns up and threatens to expose her 'bigamy' unless she coughs up £500 (the amount keeps rising through the film). Any sensible woman would tell him to clear off, and explain this development to her husband, and the police - it is the first husband who is the criminal, not her. (She doesn't know the true extent of his crimes, including theft and murder, but she knows he's a blackmailer!) But there has to be a plot, so fair enough. She pleads poverty, despite having a servant, but finally gives in. When Price pushes her too far she shoots him dead with his own gun, and then decides to confess all to her husband, who rushes to the crime scene to remove the evidence. Oh dear, she's murderer, and their best friend is a copper, heading the search for Price - she's in 'a jam', as desperate situations are described in this kind of script. Fortunately, Price's death is faked - he's going to disappear, and pin the blame for an actual murder on her, relying on another implausible chain of events, incredibly unlikely to occur, but which of course do. Never mind, the cops work it out, and it's all sorted in a hour, with a final revelation that Price has an earlier marriage behind him, so the heroine's current one is legal after all! Contrived hokum.
Calling Paul Temple (1948)
Cheerful hokum.
Sort-of likeable ragbag of every thriller cliché imaginable about a serial killer, in which amateur sleuth Paul Temple is called in by the professional cops to more or less tell them how to do their job. It has all the usual ingredients of the type: coincidences, red herrings, witnesses who are bumped off precisely at the moment when they are saying 'the killer is ...' (you can get away with this once, perhaps, but three times??), a villain who is obvious from the start, a laughable hypnosis scene (only the hypnotist can bring the victim out of the trance, except that Temple can do it as well, by using the magic of speech!), and a final, Poirot-style gathering of every suspect still alive in a room, and a fist fight. Temple and his wife Stevie cheerfully brush off the killer's attempts to shoot them, blow them up, and drown them like it's just another day of routine events in the Temple diary. Luckily, they have a vaguely racial stereotype of a servant, complete with funny foreign accent, to assist them.
A couple of plus points - some nice shots of 1940s Canterbury, and a night club song called Lady on the Loose, with a lyric that might have come from an Amy Winehouse song, such as 'I want a man who's true to me to the end of the night,' and 'Ladies, shut your windows, lock your doors, the man I'm after might be yours' I can't trace the song, partly written by Steve Race.
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
Nothing to see here.
Hammer horrors are not my favourite genre of film, but okay if they're done well, and this one most definitely is not. Fine, you don't expect a film about the occult to be realistic, but you do expect that it will make some kind of sense, with a logically coherent plot, within the confines of its premise. The plot here goes something like this:
Defrocked Satanist, Father Michael (Christopher Lee) packs a young nun, Katherine (Nastasia Kinski) off from Bavaria to London to meet her father, Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliot). Why he does this is unclear since a) she is approaching her 18th birthday, the age at which she will be ritualised into becoming the bride of Satan, or some such dubious honour, and b) because Lee spends the rest of the film trying to get her back. Okay, he has made a deal with her father, which gives him an annual visitation in return for giving her soul to the devil, but you wouldn't think that Satan is too bothered by contractual obligations would you? We'll let that pass, and move to London, where you would expect that dad is anxiously waiting for her, and preparing to welch on his deal and protect her from Satan's arms. But no, some important business comes up, so he does the obvious thing and gate-crashes the book launch party of an occult novelist, John Verney (Richard Widmark), whom he's never met, and asks him to meet Katherine at the airport, and shelter her at his flat. If this isn't crazy enough as logical plot, Verney agrees to this plan, rather than having this total stranger thrown out. Meanwhile, back in Bavaria, Michael and his team are overseeing a gruesome birth, during which the mother is tied down, and then murdered, after some kind of weird caesarean procedure. This baby's role in the story was never clear to me, but let's not worry about that.
Back in London, Katherine is in hiding at Verney's place, and a recurring motif of any badly constructed 'damsel in distress' type plot comes into play. It might take the form of the hero telling the heroine 'Lock your door, and don't open it to anyone!' or 'Stay home, and don't go anywhere until I get back!' and so on, and you immediately know that she will open the door to the first random who appears, or that she will leave the house at the first opportunity. The heroine has to ignore the instructions or the plot can't ....plot. In this case Verney leaves Katherine in the 'safe' care of his friends Anthony Valentine and Honour Blackman -' don't let her out of your sight' he says. Which. of course, they do, not once, but twice. Fittingly, they both pay for their lack of diligence: Honour B is stabbed by Katherine, who has suddenly changed from God-fearing nun into dangerous psychopath, while Anthony V picks up an ancient relic and bursts into flames. Dad has become a gibbering idiot, in an armchair inside a circle, Katherine is whisked off for her ceremony, and her fate, but saved in the nick of time by Verney, but I was too bored by this time to be bothered with understanding what was going on. It's all a mess, right down to a Satanic demon that looks like a leprechaun. Widmark and Elliot spend the film wondering what on earth happened to their careers, and the nude scene of a then fourteen-year-old Kinski is especially exploitative, if not abusive. Give it a miss.
The Marked One (1963)
Forgettable.
Typical of its low-budget fraternity, this is sadly a flat, would-be thriller that lacks any real tension or interest. It features all the usual stock ingredients of the genre - stereotyped, cardboard characters and motifs (cops in trilby hats, villains whose HQ is fronted by a coffee bar, numerous dolly birds called Ruby, Angel and so on who have very little to do, a final, obligatory, chase and punch-up) and the well-worn plot of innocent(ish) hero on the run from both cops and robbers. It's a jigsaw of a plot whose pieces fail to come together into a coherent whole, and its only afterwards that you question why some of the pieces were there at all, including a murder that seems entirely pointless. Any potential interest - the kidnapping of the hero's child - occurs so late in the film that she is rescued ten minutes later, because the kidnapper is a bungling idiot, who actually takes the girl with him to collect the booty where, of course, her dad lies in wait. Nice location shots, shame about the rest.
Trent's Last Case (1952)
'Amateur detective is smarter than police' shock!
Formulaic whodunnit that threatens to be interesting but turns out not to be. We've seen the setup many times before - amateur sleuth Trent (Michael Wilding) investigates an alleged suicide case, and unearths clues that the police were too dim to find for themselves, suggesting it was murder (the victim's fingerprints on the gun were from the wrong hand: he's a lefty, and nobody noticed the discrepancy ... ) The only difference in this case is that Trent's detailed description of what actually happened is wrong, so it wasn't murder after all, it was a suicide made to look like murder so that the dead man can frame his male secretary (John McCallum) in retaliation for lusting after his wife. But wait! That's not the 'real' explanation either -the gun went off by accident in a struggle, when the suicide was about to occur, but was interrupted by Miles Malleson, out for a late night stroll. These revelations come thick and fast at the end, but by then you don't care any more because each of them is more preposterous than the one before. A decent cast are better than the material, and there is an ill-fitting cameo from Orson Welles, with prosthetic face, as a larger than life character belonging to a different kind of film. The least you hope for is that it won't have the usual, predictable, ending, but your hopes are dashed: once the suicide/murder/suicide to look like murder/accident has been solved, Trent can marry the man's widow (Margaret Lockwood), whom he first met a couple of days ago. A real disappointment, but fortunately it's Trent's last case.
Witness in the Dark (1959)
Better than most.
Workmanlike, largely plausible, low-budget thriller about a blind woman who encounters a murderer (Nigel Green) as he flees the scene of the crime. It has a better script than many of the genre, avoiding the irrational or perfunctory dialogue that is so often a trademark. Patricia Dainton gives a convincing performance as the 'witness', with decent support from Conrad Phillips as the increasingly sympathetic cop. The show is almost stolen by Madge Ryan, as the chatterbox, busybody neighbour whose careless pub talk gives the killer his motive, and Stuart Saunders as her long-suffering layabout husband. After a seemingly hopeless search for a man that no one can identify, a vital (and credible) clue is provided by a mis-placed candlestick. Based on a play by John Parish, its theatrical origins show, but is none the worse for that - it's just a shame about the final obligatory punch-up. Well worth a hour of your time.