Operation Conspiracy

This was called Cloak without dagger in the UK and Operation Conspiracy in the US.Now which is the worst?The leading lady is Mary Mackenzie who is rather good.Sadly she died in a car crash when only 44.Leslie Dwyer plays for him the unfamiliar role of a detective.Late in life he would become a TV star.The film is very cheaply made and it shows.There is the old quota device of having all actors on camera so that they can speak their lines and there would be no need to edit the film and eliminates the necessity for any close ups.The film is a typical product of its era,particularly since it harks back to missed opportunities during the war.It is a fairly exceptional film that will not linger in your memory once the end title comes up.

A fairly run of the mill early fifties British spy thriller with some familiar faces along the way. Leslie Dwyer does his usual good job as a private investigator but the film is really enlivened by Mary Mackenzie as the female lead. She isn't an actress I'm familiar with and it seems hers was a career confined to small parts before she died in a car crash aged only 44. She's not obvious leading lady material but she's very good in this and comes over well. The best description I can come up with to describe her is that she has a passing resemblance to Flora Robson but with sex appeal. Nothing groundbreaking about the film itself but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Feisty female reporter meets an old flame, but is he mixed up in the riddle of the body in the bathroom? And what is the hotel detective doing at the weapons testing facility? Rest assured, these and other intriguing questions are eventually answered.

The absence of hi-tech spy gizmos of the James Bond variety is made up for by plenty of opportunities for sofa-based detectives to test their skill in unraveling a good mystery.

CLOAK WITHOUT DAGGER is a cheapie put out by Balblair Productions, who released precisely three films during their short-lived career in the film business: this, THE BLACK RIDER, and STOCK CAR. All of them were written by prolific screenwriter A. R. Rawlinson and STOCK CAR is probably the best of the rather nondescript bunch, a gangster story set in and around a garage. CLOAK WITHOUT DAGGER is more undistinguished, a film in which the villains are spies working for their own purposes.

It starts off well with some top intrigue inside a nondescript hotel and goes downhill from there. Leslie Dwyer is a likable enough familiar face in the British B-film genre but he's miscast as a detective here. Mary Mackenzie is much better as the plucky heroine who literally stumbles over a corpse at one point. There are welcome roles for Allan Cuthbertson, Bill Nagy, and Frank Thornton, but the whole thing feels rather lifeless and drawn out, a far cry from the best of the spy thriller genre. Perhaps the budget just wasn't up to the job.

In places this resembles a sixties rather than a fifties spy movie, with it's sinister Chinese femme fatale and plot involving nuclear weapons, and boasts the promotion of the rather stern-looking Mary Mackenzie (who usually played unglamorous character parts and actually declares at one point that "I could never be described as lush!") to the sharp-witted, sharp-featured and sharp-suited heroine who does most of the sleuthing.