The Saint's Return

The movie series based on Leslie Chateris' long-running collection of novels about "the Robin Hood of Crime" ends where it began, with Louis Hayward taking on the role of Simon Templar. When a girl friend dies after sending him a telegram asking him for help, the police thinks it was an accident. Hayward soon discovers a ring of crooks running a crooked gambling joint. The problem lies in finding out who the mysterious boss is and wrapping them up in a neat bow before Chief Inspector Charles Victor can arrest him for the corpse that came tumbling out of Hayward's refrigerator.

It's a handsome mix of light-hearted bravado, lucky turns and murderous incidents, far removed from the RKO series of the early 1940s. It's a solid light-hearted mystery from Hammer Films, despite the fact that Hayward is not the young man he had been a decade and a half earlier. Naomi Chance is the busty young woman whom he reforms, although Diana Dors has a small role in which, after complaining that she has no gun to use on Hayward, is told to "Use what she's got" and she most certainly does.

Still, there wasn't enough interest to keep the series going. It would be another decade before it was successfully revived on the small screen, with a perfectly cast Roger Moore.

After being the first actor to play The Saint, Louis Hayward returns to the role of Leslie Charteris's debonair modern Robin Hood for Hammer films in Great Britain. The Sain't Girl Friday has Hayward rushing back to the United Kingdom in response to a socialite friend of his. Before he arrives however the woman is killed in a mighty suspicious car crash.

Charles Victor as Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard tells Hayward to stay out of it which is all the incentive Simon Templar needs to get in all the more. His late friend had a nasty gambling habit and she was in debt to a group called The River Gang.

This bunch doesn't always take pound sterling for payment. Any number of people can work off their debt in other ways. Finding this out is eventually how Hayward cracks the case.

Television fans of The Saint remember a young Roger Moore as Simon Templar and the big screen actor best known for the role is George Sanders. But Hayward does his usual good work and he would have been great himself as a small screen Simon Templar before Moore got the part.

The Saint's Girl Friday features British blond bombshell Diana Dors, their answer to Marilyn Monroe. She's as good a reason as any to see this film.

A good note to end the big screen series with.

Louis Hayward returns to the character he helped launch on the big screen in the first of RKO's The Saint series back in the '30s. He portrayed a gritty and tough Saint in one movie before George Sanders took over and made the role his own, bringing a suaveness and sophistication to the part. It's a nice bookend for the character, I suppose, to have the same actor start and essentially finish the series. Hammer was probably hoping this might revive the series for them. Unfortunately it did not and the reason is this movie is lifeless. Whatever appealed to Hayward about the role of Simon Templar in 1938 that helped his performance there so much seems long gone here. This time around he seems to be just going through the motions and collecting a paycheck. No one else in the cast stands out in any noticeable way and the script is a cure for insomnia, so there really isn't much else to say about this. It's a dull movie that you'll probably forget a minute after the end credits appear.

Like Louis Hayward as the Saint. Sydney Tafler as usual an excellent bad guy. Some of fight scenes are a bit tame. My expectations of this film weren't high sure it has it's flaws but found it entertaining enough & there's more good than bad in this film. The England of the early 50's portrayed here seems a different world today. A film should be entertaining & hold your interest in spite of some of it's flaws it largely achieves this & that is more than Citizen Kane did ( mind numbingly boring) It's a film that somehow makes you want to go back in time to early 50's & see the UK as it was then.

I've seen hundreds of RKO Pictures but this is one of the very worst, released in America in 1954 in the waning years of the distributor's existence. It's a must-miss, terminally boring entry in The Saint series starring Louis Heyward as the supposedly charming but deadly dull detective.

The script is lousy, direction by ultra-hack Seymour Friedman nonexistent, and the supporting cast miserable. Leading lady Naomi Chance is a nonstarter. Much of the running time is devoted to the unfunny and stupid conflict of The Saint with the local British gendarmes, while the mystery of a woman's death via car crash is never interesting or compelling.

What we're left with is an hour of pure filler, devoid of entertainment value. Looking fabulous clad at first just in a bath towel, platinum blonde local bombshell Diana Dors brightens up the screen for merely a couple of minutes, hardly enough to justify sitting through this junker.