Smokescreen

The biggest shame about Jim O'Connelly's quirky low-budget British post-noir SMOKESCREEN is that it was a film instead of a television series since Peter Vaughan's perpetually cautious and stingy insurance adjuster Roper had so many more adventures in him....

His particular case involves what the audience and a young couple witness from the very beginning: a burning car driving off a cliff, and we never see a driver, which is what Roper searches for throughout the hour-long programmer, going from one person to the next in the usual investigative fashion...

What makes SMOKESCREEN so fun and involving are not only the oddballs he comes across, but how Vaughan's own eccentric character reacts to each, especially an equally chintzy doctor and bribing railroad worker...

And then the supposed dead man's wife played by CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF ingenue Yvonne Romain, who Roper's handsome sidekick (John Carson) is smitten with... You'll be glad they keep having to return to her.

Vaughan would later play big, strong, intimidating monsters of men, like in Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS as the leader of a gang of low-rent Brits bullying Dustin Hoffman, and even an actual ogre in TIME BANDITS, which is why it's fun seeing him jauntily making his way through East Essex with an umbrella and the countenance of an awkward, uptight accountant who never threw a punch...

Which is an important Noir-gumshoe element since anything can derive from the woodwork, and a great cinematic investigator is usually the most vulnerable to unseen/unknown elements: only there aren't any deadly thugs lurking through darkened alleys... And yet the eclectic day-lit obstacles can be equally complicated, and just as intriguing, along with a grand sense of the traditional Whodunit.

Vaughan's Roper, much like Peter Falk as COLUMBO the following decade, has a way of coaxing information that only a cerebral manipulator can muster... and can you imagine if COLUMBO had only one movie instead of an entire series? Well in this case, we have to.

In films, so many mysteries are investigated by police officers, investigative reporters or family members, all of whom usually conform to a certain 'type', so it's a refreshing change to find a film such as 'Smokescreen' where the person doing the snooping is a very atypical character, a quirky insurance claims investigator who goes about searching for the truth in an efficient yet coldly detached manner. In bringing this character to life, the film affords us a rare early leading role from the excellent Peter Vaughan, but just about every character in this piece is portrayed by a gem of a British actor from the period, even those that appear rather fleetingly.

Added to which, the film is beautifully shot, making very good use of its Brighton location yet not to the point of distracting from the plot. From the dramatic opening scene, in which two young lovers on a clifftop have their tryst disturbed by a burning car zooming along nearby perilously out of control before it plummets over the edge, it is apparent that this is a film of superior quality. Whether or not the car's owner was actually in the vehicle when it plunged into the sea isn't clear, and that is the question which Vaughan's character, Roper, must find the answer to. And even he himself is guarding a secret, as becomes apparent among the various twists and turns this pleasing yarn takes.

My only sense of disappointment as I watched it was that I'd worked out the solution long before the end. Or so I thought, for at the climax I discovered that the film outsmarted me. See if it manages to outsmart you.

A flaming car goes over the cliff near Brighton to land in the water hundreds of feet below. There's an insurance policy to be paid out, a bright new one just taken out, for a hundred thousand pounds, so his suspicious boss sends insurance investigator Peter Vaughan to poke around. There's no clear motive for what happened, since business was good and so was his marriage to beautiful, rich Yvonne Romaine, but it's clear that the driver faked his death to clear out.His boss, however, insists on a motive..... and that leads to some interesting insights.

Vaughan offers a delightful performance of a cartoonish-looking man in homburg and black umbrella, a skinflint as interested in cheating his insurance company out of shillings as of saving them from a false claim for a hundred thousand pounds..... even as they put him up at the most expensive hotel in Brighton while he investigates. He looks terrified trying to get information out of man-hungry Penny Morrell by getting her squiffed, and the question of who did what and why is brilliantly hidden under a trail of red herrings.

Vaughan is probably best known these days for his role on GAME OF THRONES. His role was probably written out when he fell ill and died in 2016 at the age of 93.

A modest, but quietly effective story of an insurance assessor (the ever reliable Peter Vaughn) investigating a possibly suspicious claim following the plunging of a car over a Brighton clifftop. Vaughn is first class as the dogged, brolly-carrying Roper, on screen virtually throughout, as he questions everything and trusts no-one. It has the feel of a police procedural, and there is some wry humour derived from his reluctance to spend money, and to fiddle his expenses at every opportunity, for the best of reasons, we discover. A stalwart supporting cast keep things real, and there are nice location shots. Worth an hour of anyone's time.

Peter Vaughan, a wonderful actor, is the rather slimy insurance investigator investigating a claim in coastal Sussex.

And this unlikely hero succeeds where the Police have failed!

Made on a tiny budget, this film proves that enormous budgets are not always necessary to make good cinema.

Truly a minimalist marvel.