Norman Conquest

Released on this side of the pond by Poverty Row studio Lippert Pictures, Norman Conquest has the former Falcon Tom Conway playing another private detective who starts heeding the voice of his male member when it concerns the alluring Eva Bartok and gets framed for murder.

It's a rather clumsy frame that all but thick as a brick police inspector Sid James can figure out. Even he's convinced after a while.

It all has to do with some stolen jewels and a Nazi war criminal thought dead but actually in Great Britain. Eva Bartok is from some unnamed Eastern European country and she's playing her own game with both her Communist satellite government and the baron. It all doesn't work out in the end with a climax taken from Destry Rides Again.

Conway must have felt he was back at RKO playing The Falcon. Norman Conquest has a rather muddled storyline and moves to slow even for a 75 minute running time. If you like Tom Conway and/or Eva Bartok I'd check this one out.

PI Tom Conway gets mixed up with some spy stuff involving Eva Bartok and Richard Wattis.

It's a cheap, dull affair, with an aging Conway irresistible to the ladies, and done as cheaply as possible. Tom slugs a number of men with guns, undercranked car rides go on for a minute at a time, and there's an organ score by Philip Green consisting of two bars of music repeated every now and again. Miss Bartok looks like she's fourteen years old, dressed in her mother's evening gown. His regular girlfriend, Joy Shelton, is named Pixie, but Conway always calls her 'sweetheart', like he's Bogart with an English accent. The editing is atrocious.

Sid James appears as the police detective who's perpetually exasperated by Conway. I know how he feels. By the time everything was cleared up, I didn't care.

'Park Plaza 605' or it's alternative title 'Norman Conquest' is a low budget British B-movie that you will never have heard of with B-Pic regular Tom Conway, (Brother of George Sanders) playing Private Detective Norman Conquest who gets mixed up with Nazi Criminals, Murder, and a Blonde Femme Fatale when he hits a carrier Pigeon playing a golf shot (don't ask!) and proceeds to go to the Park Plaza Hotel room 605 out of curiosity after reading a message the bird was carrying.

Co-Starring Sid James (Before his 'Carry on' fame) and Eva Bartok as the Beautiful Femme Fatale with minor roles for Terrence 'Bergerac' Alexander & Richard 'Allo Allo' Marner.

Not great, but not bad for a 75 min B-Movie...Keep your expectations low and you - Like me, should enjoy

**1/2 out of *****

I bought this film because I'm interested in the British b film era of the 1950s and I didn't believe that I'd ever seen it before. The score by Philip Green (not the retail entrepreneur), and in particular a smug and highly irritating theme which recurs throughout the score, made me realise that I had seen it many years before. I wasn't able to recall a solitary frame of it however. Hardly surprising. Most of the clichés of the era are present: a suave, gentleman detective played by Tom Conway (George Sanders' brother, don't you know) in a particularly smug and irritating manner it has to be said (perhaps Philip Green's music wasn't that wide of the mark after all); sinister foreigners, unreal characters seemingly unshocked by violence and murder, toe curling behaviour from all and sundry. Based on the Norman Conquest (not that one) novels which were written by Berkeley Gray, Gray wrote over 800 of the blighters.

Bizarrely, its director, Bernard Knowles, directed Magical Mystery Tour for the Beatles fourteen years later. I am the walrus this ain't.

All in all Park Plaza 605 can be summarised as mediocre and lifeless rubbish from the golden age of the British second feature. Buy it now from Odeon Entertainment!

A slick tongue-in cheek little Cold War thriller making light of the usual casualties (starting with an unfortunate courier in the opening scene) in which Hollywood's 'B' picture 'Saint' Tom Conway tangles with foxy foreign femme Eva Bartok (in a blonde wig and a tight shiny dress) and various mean-looking goons while cop Sid James looks on in helpless exasperation.