Roadhouse Girl

Wolf Rilla made an extraordinary directorial debut with this nihilistic piece of low life which most commentators have compared to 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' but actually more resembles 'Ossessione'.

Leslie Dwyer is meaner and more dictatorial than the husband usually is, Sandra Dorne just a spoilt child with terrible taste in men; and no prizes for guessing which side Vida Hope bats for.

B-Movie maestro Wolf Rilla 'rilla' delivers some super-melodramatic Brit-Noir pizazz in the splendidly monikered 'Roadhouse Girl', a low-budget, high blood-pressured, doomily Dashiell Hammett-ed pot-boiler, wherein itinerant grease monkey, the tall drink of dish water Tom Price (Maxwell Reed) secures employment at an isolated, somewhat insalubrious roadside garage, owned by dour, hypertensive, oily misanthrope George Sanders (Leslie Dwyer), who is incongruously married to the breathtakingly beauteous, vastly frustrated, serially flirtatious Marilyn (Sandra Dorne), and before you can say 'lipstick on my crankshaft', the considerably 'handy' Tom enthusiastically provides some extracurricular lubrication service for this divine-looking, dingy dive-dancin' Roadhouse-rocking, B-Movie bombshell!

Wolf Rilla's black-seamed, steamy-windowed melodrama about the increasingly volatile ménage à trois between Brylcreemed, sleazy operator Nick (Ferdy Mayne), the wildly quixotic, weirdly petulant Marilyn, and big, greasy-fingered lug Tom sinfully simmers to a suitably fraught, deliciously dramatic, exciting B-Movie Noir conclusion! In this delightfully tawdry, tannin-stained, low rent gloomy thriller, overheated, highly revved, erotically charged emotions dangerously percolate to a perfectly hysterical, wonderfully camp, bathos-laden climax, while juicy bombshell Marilyn is initially one sticky sweet confection, said glossy veneer belies a poisonously malignant centre, 'Marilyn' is moody Brit-Noir at its finest/dingiest!

Directed and scripted by Wolf Rilla, who later came into his own with Village of the Damned. He clearly has not mastered either directing or writing at this point. Scenes are awkward and the script....well, the script. Rilla often has a character repeat the same line or idea multiple times. You never really see this in a film and it came off as amateurish at first. When i thought about it, it actually was quite realistic. That's how folks often speak "in real life". Now, was it planned? Who knows? Regardless, it's interesting.

The acting is questionable as well. Marilyn's maid (who appears to be in love with Marilyn) never raises her voice. It comes off as a bit odd....as does Tom's acting. Again, I'm not sure what to make of it.

If you're a big noir fan, it's worth a look. Otherwise, pass.

I saw this today Monday 20/8/18 on "Talking Pictures" channel 81 for the first time.Elements of the captioned well known films were used in its plot line and.In place of John Garfield we have Maxwell Reed giving his eyebrowns another workout.In place of June Anderson (Mrs Danvers) from Rebecca we have the character of Rosie, with lesbian longings for Sandra Dorn which of course could not be shown on screen in 1953 only suggested.The points made by other reviewers were valid but the final scene of police cars drawing up to a stop at the petrol station indicated the producers were short of the funds to finish the film and /or didn't know how to give it a satisfactory ending.This may account for its mediocre rating by reviewers just over 5 whereas I awarded it 6.

This low budget British film is a version of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, about adultery, passion, a love triangle, and murder, all set around that most British of locations, an independent garage. An interesting cast go through the motions here although it's fair to say that the constraints of the budget mean that the film never really excites or innovates and instead sort of just plods along.

It doesn't help that we've seen this age-old story play out time and again. Maxwell Reed (BLACKOUT) is the heartthrob hero, a drifter who finds employment at the hands of a bad-tempered mechanic (Leslie Dwyer, great but underutilised in a character role). He soon falls for the comely charms of Dwyer's wife, Sandra Dorne, who is a Diana Dors-alike and not a bad actress at all. You can guess the rest of the story, but fun is added from Ferdy Mayne's stalwart suitor and the chance to see Kenneth Connor in a bit part. Although MARILYN is entirely devoid of originality, it's a relatively watchable little piece with plenty of character work going on.