Murder in Eden

Murder in Eden is a quota quickie. A low budget B movie that has an early leading role for the great character actor Ray McAnally.

He plays Inspector Sharkey called into investigate the death of an art critic in a hit and run accident. The critic had earlier claimed that some paintings in an art exhibition were fake.

Sharkey finds himself paired up with a beautiful French journalist Geneviève Beaujean. It is not long before someone tries to run Sharkey over.

A brisk plot but it still feels padded. At least there is an interesting twist near the end but was Sharkey always one step ahead?

This might be the only time McAnally had a leading role in a movie. Then again the film was shot in Ireland but is supposedly set in London.

Directed by Frenchman Max Varnel son of famed comedy director Marcel Varnel,and featuring French actress Catherine Feller.This is a bottom of the bill thriller which provides few thrills and little action.

The corpses pile up without anyone being too upset in this light-hearted quickie shot in Ireland concerning the theft of a painting worth £55,000 (a lot of money in those days). For probably the first and last time Ray McAnally plays the dashing two-fisted hero, while continental cutie Catherine Feller drives about in a bubble car to accordion music supplied on the soundtrack by Wilfred Burns to make sure we know she's French.

Very good Brit B, with Ray McAnally (better known to me as a car connoisseur on BBC Entertainment, and here acting none at all anally) playing an effective Inspector Sharkey, and Feller trying to pass off as a French girl with bulging eyes in a cute bubble car, whilst the villainous vehicle is a magnificent Bentley with a weird "Spirit of the Wolf" metallic figurehead... ah, the saucy sixties!

Sexy Yvonne Buckingham is a palace playing the sadly short part of Vicky Woolf. Exquisite face, figure and legs - to die for!

Competent photography (despite the obvious painted background in the final sequence), excellent and very melodious French accordion soundtrack and capable direction by Max Varnel (whom I do not know from Adam but whose father was apparently a French director of some standing), all neatly packed into an economical 61 minutes. Definitely worth watching!

Art expert Robert Lepler tells gallery owner Mark Singleton that the old master he is about to deliver is a fine forgery. Someone switched it for the real one after Lepler authenticated it. He's working on a book on forgeries. He also tells Singleton that the latest painting he is touting is a forgery. Singleton pulls it, but Lepler dies in a hit-and-run, just as French journalist Catherine Feller shows up to interview him; she finds Inspector Ray McAnally crossing her path, as well as oil magnate and collector Jack Aranson, and restorer Michael Lucas.

It's a nice little script, fairly ambitious in its coverage of the hothouse world of art collection for a B movie, and always threatening to turn farcical when Miss Feller and McAnally cross paths. While director Max Vanel is good at covering the story and the visuals, the accents come and go, and a lot of the actors speak Received Pronunciation with what sounds to me like an Irish lilt. Some very smelly red herrings get dragged along the path, and it's a fair, although not too challenging mystery.