Partners in Crime

The lorry driver and the executive, to liquidate the latter’s partner in Cool-Kups, a soft drink firm started after the war.

The sharp analysis is a hallmark of an Edgar Wallace film.

The House That Dripped Blood

The chief inspector after a disappeared film star at Yew Tree House (A.J. Stoker & Co., Sole Agents, Hynde Street, Braye), three previous tenants recounted by a local police sergeant.

Robert Bloch on the artist who even in defeat is triumphant, it’s the principle of the thing, not a low-budget feature at Shepperton Studios called Curse of the Bloodsuckers, with real vampires, can negate his purpose, and that goes for the work of his pen or hand.

Roger Greenspun (New York Times) was halfway amused, having no idea. Tom Milne of Time Out Film Guide similarly admired it as a curate’s egg.

The estate agent finally offers an interpretation of his own that cannot be left out of account.

England Made Me

Berlin in 1935. “Government by confidence tricksters, that’s what I’m up against, and they’re not gonna pull me down. I’m just gonna take their money. That’s all.”

Graham Greene, where Brecht describes a protection racket.

“The party is Hitler! But Hitler is Germany, as Germany is Hitler! Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

Vincent Canby didn’t care for it (nor, the same day, Eastwood’s Breezy, “cloyingly naïve”), finding the director “very clumsy” (New York Times).

Variety spoke of “intelligence and sensitivity, if not optimum success.”

Time Out Film Guide laments “that the film was unfairly neglected at the time.”

Halliwell’s Film Guide has “a lively, intelligent character melodrama.”

Ken Russell reaches much the same conclusion in The Devils, sacrifice and exile (cf. Leslie Howard’s The First of the Few).

Inside Out

Precisely the joke of the title is that Nazi gold seized in the Balkans, appropriated by Goering and hidden by a war criminal now in a four-power prison has passed under the territorial control of the Soviets, c’est tout.

The joke is expressed in a complicated plan to liberate the loot.

Telly Savalas, Robert Culp, James Mason and Guenter Meisner are the plotters.

“Entertaining but very silly”, says Halliwell’s Film Guide, which couldn’t quite follow the plot. That was Time Out Film Guide’s problem, “after Duffell’s impressive England Made Me... comes as a disappointment.”

Caught on a train

The PR man from London who puts literary men on television with copious drink, if need be.

Ostend to Linz by rail with a Viennese lady of advanced years.

King of the Wind

The very amusing story of the Godolphin Arabian and his many vicissitudes, the Hobgoblin he had to kick, the carts he had to pull, the stripes he bore, the privations, to sire the line.

Time Out Film Guide wished it away, “this viewer would have been happy to trade the surfeit of plot for a touch of subtlety.”