You Killed Elizabeth
Three Cases of Murder

The curious case of a certain Edgar, who mixes his drinks and blacks out from time to time, following Toye on Turner (here, Alan Badel plays the observant barman).

Zoo Baby

Case of the young lad not quite “sivilized”, Dad has the Hatari! job in Nairobi, putting a giraffe in the Paris Zoo.

The wilds of Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, to say nothing of Hampton Court. “Ugh, film units! We had a film unit here last week, frightened the bear cubs half to death.”

“Tsk, filming ain’t no good for animals. There was once a good half-dozen vultures ‘ere. They borrowed ‘em for a film.”

“What happened to them?”

“Starved ‘em, I tell you. Starved ‘em t’ the bone! Riders o’ Death Valley, they called it.” Vd. on this most obscure point Asquith’s The V.I.P.s a few years later, cf. Pasolini’s contribution to Rogopag (Laviamoci il cervello), “La ricotta”. The divine creature, gift of a generalissimo, is a female cousin to Popeye’s Jeep, her incidental and fortuitous liberation nevertheless anticipates Turtle Diary (dir. John Irvin), though here it has the makings of an international incident on top of everything else, “didn’t you know I was a dangerous Red?”

An assured work of genius by the assiduous screenwriter Jan Read, designed by Duncan Sutherland, the swan song of Ernest Palmer, scored by Edwin Astley.

Faces in the Dark

A masterpiece on the business motif also to be found in Lubin’s Impact and by reflection Maté’s D.O.A.

Unquestionably the subject is a light bulb, in cartoon parlance an idea, the Apollo light bulb. Others want a share in the production, the partner has doubts in the company, a tremendous expense is involved.

The man with the idea has enemies on every side and doesn’t know it, he sees incidental opposition easily brushed aside, that’s all.

He is blinded in a testing accident (Welles’ Citizen Kane for this, the breakdown), and as a blind man learns to “see” in other senses, the nightmare begins to take shape, have definition, marvelously detailed and exact, excruciating, maddening, nothing like it until Tony Richardson’s Laughter in the Dark except Lubin and Maté.

John Gregson lurching awkwardly like Frankenstein’s monster or Orson Welles per Truffaut’s description, Mai Zetterling the German wife, John Ireland the playboy brother, Michael Denison the partner, et al.

Desmond Davis works the camera for Ken Hodges, Mikis Theodorakis wrote the score, from the authors of Les Diaboliques (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot), Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), Les Yeux sans Visage and Pleins feux sur l’assassin (dir. Georges Franju), etc.

Nonsense in Halliwell’s Film Guide, “puzzler”, Hitchcock manqué, etc.

The Hi-Jackers
The Saint

The inside job on U.S. Army PXs in Germany is an essential factor of Ford’s Gideon’s Day, this is a very keen analysis taken up by Pinter in Michael Anderson’s The Quiller Memorandum, which supplies all the understanding needed except for the curious point of blonde and beautiful Mathilde’s character, “running”, and that is reflected back into Anderson’s film very usefully.

Munich, Oktoberfest (note the Fernsprecher in the parade sequence).