British B-Movies at the BFI, Part # 2

For my second dose of British b-pictures, I decided to hit the NFT for a double bill of movies that formed part of an apparently long-running series of low budget films based on the work of famed mystery writer Edgar Wallace. These films, it seems, were always introduced by a wonderfully campy title sequence featuring a bust of the great man slowly rotating toward the camera amid a cloud of mist, as a cut price imitation of The Shadows’ ‘Man of Mystery’ plays on the soundtrack. I can only speak for myself, but I found that bit worth the price of the ticket alone.

The programme notes accompanying the screening initially refer to the Wallace series as being “wildly popular”, but both some contradictory comments later in the same text and the reminiscences of the two old gents sitting behind me would seem to somewhat undermine this assumption. Circumstantial evidence suggests that these homegrown quickies were rarely popular with audiences, with cinema crowds regularly groaning, throwing projectiles at the screen or ducking out for a drink when the lugubrious Wallace title sequence hoved into view. Disrespectful behaviour, you might think, but having now seen a few of these movies, I know exactly where they were coming from. While both the films screened tonight undoubtedly have their points of interest and saving graces, they also can’t help but emerge as spectacularly dull and unengaging pieces of filmmaking. Frankly, if these two have been picked out as the best in the series, it’s small wonder they found little favour with audiences and critics, at a time when Hollywood, bloated though it may have been in the early ‘60s, was still offering romance, decadence, shoot-outs, musical numbers, casts of thousands and Charlton Heston parting the red sea in glorious technicolor.

Flat Two (Alan Cooke, 1962) is a drearily sordid tale in which a sleazy casino boss is found dead in his lavish apartment on the same night that two men with entirely unconnected motives for the crime happened to break in, and a selection of police detectives and barristers proceed to hang around in a gentlemen’s club, casually trying to get to the bottom of things. The main point of interest here is an appearance by the superb John LeMesurier, and as ever he’s a class act, although the script gives him precious little to work with. The mannered British performances and stiff upper lip approach to drama is as hypnotically charming as it ever is in these things, but the rest of the cast is dry to the point of dehydration, and the story – which doles out alibis and motives as dispassionately as cards in a Cluedo game – is a bore for anyone who likes their murder mysteries to carry some sort of emotional weight alongside the logic puzzles. Oh, and the only female character is an empty-headed hussy and all the working class characters are small-time crooks on the make – because that’s the way things were done back then. One best kept for the long, dark teatime of the soul, I fear.

Never Back Losers (Robert Tronson, 1961) is altogether more lively, a tale of a rookie insurance investigator stumbling his way into uncovering a South London race-fixing scam. The plot is hokey and unconvincing, but there are some great attempts here to try and imbue the material with an American sense of hardboiled pulp squalor, as our man traipses through the sordid streets of Soho, doing the rounds of crooked bookies and basement clubs, receiving a beating in a dark alleyway for his troubles and falling down the stairs to land at the feet of sultry, fishnet-clad cigarette girl Jacqueline Ellis. Yowza. Also thoroughly entertaining is the presence of the one and only Patrick Magee, playing menacing gang boss ‘Big’ Ben Black with all the subtlety and restraint you’d expect. One of the funniest things I’ve seen in months is the scene in which our insurance man, his dame and her jockey kid brother leave their house in an archetypally dreary South London suburb, only to find they’re being followed! Turning around, they see Macgee and his goons in extremely slow pursuit, in a gigantic, tailfinned Cadillac Eldorado, with Magee leaning out of the window, cheroot in hand, wobbling along like a big, angry toad! Wonderful! A few more scenes like this raise a chuckle, but can’t quite keep the slight story afloat – especially when most of the film’s enjoyable moments result from the director’s brave but doomed attempts to make exciting and striking things happen within the inherently drab and self-deprecating context of pre-Beatles Britain.

And in a sense, maybe that’s the key to why these British b-pictures so rarely hit the mark. Perhaps it’s just a matter of distance, but when British viewers watch an American crime movie, there’s a sense that *anything* can happen – that we’re watching a bulletin from a world where life is dangerous, where deals go down, tough guys live and bad things happen. What’s more, the minutiae of American life can fit INTO this world – Sam Spade could munch a Hershey bar, and it would be cool. Move things across the Atlantic though, and any attempt to inject a stylised sense of danger and excitement into proceedings is sabotaged by the knowledge that just around the corner there’s Weetabix and Marmite, Morris Minors and policemen with funny moustaches, making anything remotely dramatic or threatening just seem implausible and silly. Of course, the true British crime idiom would come into its own over the course of the next decade, crystallised through iconic films like ‘Performance’ and ‘Get Carter’, a whole universe away from the milieu of these tired and anachronistic Wallace adaptations.

The irony of course is that at the same time as the British studios were knocking out these sub-par timewasters, the German film industry was busy transforming the Edgar Wallace back catalogue into the swathe of far more daring, controversial and exciting movies that comprised the much-loved ‘Krimi’ sub-genre, bringing us such shockers as “The Fellowship of The Frog” (1959), “Strangler of Blackmoor Castle” (1963) and “The Phantom of Soho” (1964), whose titles alone probably tell you all you need to know about the continental approach to the same material that was putting British audiences to sleep, and whose influence eventually helped birth the Giallo in Italy, drawing a direct line between Wallace’s work and some of the most eye-popping excesses of European cult cinema in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Score one for the foreigners I’m afraid, Major. Well at least we had Hammer, eh?

British B-Movies at the BFI, Part # 1

This December, the British Film Institute has seen fit to run a short season of vintage British b-pictures, pulling some choice items from the NFT archives, most of them rarely screened since their initial theatrical release, backing up the big Hollywood items of the day at the bottom of double or even triple bills. Given how familiar we’ve become with the history and conventions of American b-movies, from the heyday of westerns, RKO gangster flicks and poverty row quickies through to the slide into exploitation and horror, I was interested in getting a feel for their unheralded and largely forgotten British equivalents, and managed to make it along to two of the four double bills that the BFI is running.

In an era when information and a critical consensus on even the most obscure movie can be googled up in a few seconds, it was strangely exciting going to the cinema with no idea at all what to expect. Nobody except maybe archivists and British cinema historians have watched some of these films in decades – could they be lost classics, or just total junk? Well, for the most part they’re neither as it turns out, but they are at least entertaining, competently constructed timewasters and great examples of unpretentious popular cinema, not to mention effective “windows into a lost world”, as organisations like the BFI always like to claim, not unreasonably, when screening low budget films of questionable artistic merit.

Oddly, by far the best film I saw was also the earliest one, Penny and the Pownall Case, a rip-roaring comedy-adventure flick directed by the excellently named Harry ‘Slim’ Hand in 1948. Running to barely 45 minutes, the film was inspired by the popular ‘Jane’ newspaper strip – a daily item which, in typically reserved British fashion, traded on the adventures of a pretty lady who was constantly threatening to take her clothes off but never actually did. As such, Peggy Evans here stars as Penny, a ditzy, detective novel obsessed blonde (hey, this was 1948) who models daily for her own comic strip, as drawn by – wait for it – Christopher Lee, in one of his first screen roles! Sir Christopher’s performance here is camp as canvas, with a naive stage school sparkle in his eye that rather undermines his subsequent decades of moody “I’m a serious actOR” posturing, and it’s at least faintly unbelievable when it transpires that his character is also the ruthless kingpin of a criminal gang smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Europe! It also turns out that Penny’s roommate (Diana Dors!) works as secretary to a Scotland Yard bigwig on the trail of said Nazi-smugglers, and as such Penny is recruited by the Yard to help put an end to Lee’s dastardly schemes. The result is a non-stop cavalcade of thrills, spills and comedic antics, taking in desperate tranchcoat-clad villains, a trip to “Spain” (I think they just borrowed some sets from an opera company and hired some swarthy-looking guys as extras), dinner invitations from dashing detectives, and a speeded up chase through the home counties in Austin 10s (“step on it Jones, he’s getting away”). Remember the good old days when an airport was a scout hut with a few yards of runway…? Obviously I don’t, but this film still brings it all back.

One of the things I found most interesting about ‘Penny..’ is that, whilst it is obviously very, very restrained, some of the scenes and set ups seem to prefigure the kind of thing you’d be more likely to see years later in an American sexploitation flick – two pretty girls wrestling in their pyjamas? Penny running around town with a raincoat over her bathing costume? Plenty of ‘changing behind the curtain’ footage? Not much to go on, sure, but it must have raised a few eyebrows in 1948, when most British films still steadfastly refused to offer anything more visually stimulating than a bunch of Edwardian gents sitting around in a drawing room waiting to die. Also worth a mention are the endless succession of ludicrous outfits Peggy Evans is forced to wear – it’s hard to tell whether they’re an honest attempt at contemporary high fashion or a deliberate parody of such, but either way, her every appearance in a new scene was greeted with a roar of laughter from the crowd at the NFT, and understandably so – between the heart-shaped bonnet with matching waist-level patches and the twelve inch Robin Hood hat feather, I think the costume designer for this movie deserves credit as a visionary maniac of some kind.

In addition to this, we get some tough crime action (“what’s the news?”, “not good sir – he’s been shot through the heart, with a Luger I think”, “oh dear”), innuendo so vague it’s positively surreal (“I get the oddest letters from France”, “I’ll bet you do”), and everybody’s home in time for tea. As the title and short running time suggest, ‘Penny and the Pownall Case’ was planned as the first instalment in a series of adventures, and it’s a shame the rest seemingly never came about, because this one’s still a hoot, sixty years after the fact.

Somewhat less enjoyable was The Third Alibi, directed by b-movie stalwart Montgomery Tully in 1961. Quaint as the idea may seem today, Jack Clayton’s ‘Room At The Top’ sparked a veritable revolution in British cinema in 1959 with its frank depictions of extra-marital relationships and class conflict, and ‘The Third Alibi’ follows Clayton’s lead, in regard to the former aspect at least, with a cynical, melodramatic tale of a brooding songwriter carrying on an affair with his wife’s recently divorced sister, a situation that leads to a bungled murder plot when the sister announces her pregnancy and songwriter guy’s wife cruelly refuses his request for a divorce. As essentially a murder mystery with no mystery, it’s hard to know how to really categorise this one – given the Postman/Indemnity style storyline you could call it a noir, if only it had a decent script or any sense of visual style. As it is, it’s a fairly grim, workmanlike affair, conveying a queasy sense of suburban hopelessness, and is chiefly notable for the visual evidence it provides of an England that the bigger budget films of the period were careful to keep from the screen – a world of ugly interior décor, pebbledashed bungalows and cheap modernist furniture that was new when this film was made, and that I remember fading into the past during my own childhood. Also of interest is an excellent musical interlude featuring Cleo Laine – accompanied on the piano by Dudley Moore according to the BFI site, although I didn’t notice him. That aside, following the logic of the plot would waste an hour nicely enough on afternoon TV, and you’ll get a cruel chuckle out of the ‘poetic justice’ conclusion, but ‘The Third Alibi’ is a pretty empty experience on the whole.