Colonel March Investigates

Boris Karloff in the persona of the eyed-patched, erudite March, offers three mysteries from his office in Scotland Yard, the Bureau of Queer Complaints.

It's three episodes of what would become Colonel March of Scotland Yard, shot as pilots for the prospective series, and then strung together for theatrical release. The BBC was distinctly uninterested, until ITV was approved, whereupon the powers there decided they needed something to compete with the awful thing, whereupon they commissioned twenty-six episodes. Karloff is charming and intelligent, aspects he was rarely called upon to present in the movies, although they showed up in some of his television appearances. Stardom is just as confining as the typecasting of supporting players, and while Karloff the Object of Terror was something that could be sold to movie audiences based on his corpus of work, performances such as this would have confused them. It's a pity, because with the death of C. Aubrey Smith in 1948, this shows that Karloff could have taken over the role of the gruff but kindly, aristocratic exemplar of the Empire. But why pay the premium that Karloff commanded as a horror icon, only to confuse and upset the moviegoer?