Crime/Thriller – The Magnificent 60s

Whispering Smith Hits London / Whispering Smith vs Scotland Yard (1952) ***

“In a change to the advertised program” is probably the best place to start, since in writing nearly 2,000 reviews I’ve only, from memory, dipped into the pre-1960 era a couple of times. So let me explain. First of all when I was diving through my trove of Pressbooks, deciding what to select for the new movie exhibition in the book shop I run – Abbey Books in Paisley, Scotland – I came across a Pressbook for this. I noted it was produced by Hammer which I had always associated with horror so I was intrigued to see what the company had been up to long before it made its name mainlining on Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy.

By coincidence, I spotted the title on the listings for British streamer Talking Pictures so decided to have a look.

The first point of note, I guess, is the cast. It was par for the course in the 1960s for producers to trawl many countries in the world to make films with an international, sometimes all-star, cast, as they had worked out that it was easier to sell a movie outside the U.S. if you could pin your publicity efforts on big names from France, Italy, Scandinavia, Britain and Australia.

Here, Hammer, maybe in the vanguard of that policy, took this to the extreme. Among the three top-billed names, there isn’t a single Brit. We’ve got American Richard Carlson (The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954), Norwegian blonde bombshell Greta Gynt (Soldiers Three, 1951) and Czech Herbert Lom (A Shot in the Dark, 1964).

All this might have been grist to the trivia mill had the movie turned out not to be so damned entertaining, well above par for a B-movie. Not only, visually, does it take on aspects of film noir, slats of lights penetrating the darkness, but there are distressing overtones relating to the insanity business, where once an inmate enters a sanatorium unscrupulous staff can do anything they want, make them worse or kill them if that’s on the agenda.

There are plenty twists and a cracker of a climax, but, as importantly, Yank sleuth Whispering Smith (Richard Carlsen) and his client Ann Carter (Rona Anderson), thanks to sparkling repartee, create genuine screen charisma.

When the celebrity cop arrives in London for a vacation he is door-stepped by publisher Ann tasked with investigating the apparent suicide of her American employer’s daughter Sylvia and the mysterious disappearance of her friend Louise. Although initially rejecting the case, he changes his mind when Ann is victim of an attempted hit-and-run.

Interviews with Sylvia’s fiancé Roger Ford (Herbert Lom), a part-time puppeteer, and her lawyer Hector Reith (Alan Wheatley) throw up impressions of the dead girl as wild, strange, jealous and a gambler. The missing Louise turns out to be rather glamorous, not easily fooled, and in the mood for a taste of seduction and with a nice line in put-downs, “I like a working man,” she tells Smith.

However, a creepy sanatorium run by goatee-bearded Dr Talen (Daniel Therry) appears to be a cover for a criminal organization and Smith soon uncovers a blackmail ring. But none of the victims is willing to talk and when they do are bumped off. Smith eludes various traps, including a showdown in a tunnel and a booby-trapped boat. When Sylvia’s corpse turns up it’s unrecognizable after spending too long in the Thames.

Ann and Smith make a great team, especially when she turns snappy. “You can keep your whispering for someone else,” is one of her better retorts. She’s a surprise in other ways, a dab hand at safe-breaking, for example. It’s not clear how far he is seduced by Louise, so the issue of romance remains inconclusive.

Three standout sequences: the chase in the tunnel: Dr Taren’s disquisition on how easy it is to trap the innocent through psychiatric gobbledygook; and a murder scene where the victim is forced to turn up the sound of a succession of wirelesses to disguise the noise of the imminent gunshot.

Whether it’s the introduction of the slick American or the Scandinavian beauty, or the general pacing and twists ladled out, this is a notch above the usual British B-movie.

I should point out the alternative title is misleading, suggesting Smith is some kind of maverick cop besting Scotland Yard when in fact they work in tandem. And, for the record, he doesn’t whisper either. You might catch a glimpse of Stanley Baker (Zulu, 1964) as a reporter.

Veteran director Francis Searle (The Marked One, 1963) makes the most of the cast, the narrative and the ambience. Written by John Gilling (The Pirates of Blood River, 1962) and Steve Fisher (Rogue’s Gallery, 1968) from the bestseller by Frank H. Spearman.

Worth a watch.

Sumuru, Queen of Femina / The Girl from Rio / Mothers of America (1969) ***

Cult fans assemble. Sci fi crime thriller with for the time a fair sprinkling of nudity, and channelling psychedelic turns like Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968) and one step up from the ultra-confident gals of Deadlier than the Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969). It would have helped if there was a decent plot, and not just a barrage of double-crossing halfway in, but you can’t have everything and director Jess Franco seems to believe that the presence of a tribe of women decked out in red capes, white knee-length boots and not necessarily much in between, goes some way to compensate.

Crook Jeff Sutton (Richard Stapley) holes up in Rio with $10 million in stolen cash, unaware that his presence has already been noted by gang boss Masius (George Sanders) and local ultra-feminist Sununda (Shirley Eaton). After hooking up with manicurist Lesley (Maria Rohm), Sutton is set upon by Masius’ henchmen but escapes in a plane to Femina, “the capital city of the world of women,” a female fortress along the lines of the Bulldog Drummond pictures.

Turns out Sununda is partial to men with piles of cash, kidnapping and torturing them until they hand it over. So she can’t believe her luck when millionaire Jeff walks into her lair. Except Jeff is a bit of a fibber, having made up the story about the ten million, and instead landing at Femina in order to rescue Ulla (Marta Reves).

The plot only really kicks in when he escapes. Masius agrees to help Jeff in return for the pretend-thief helping him hijack Sununda’s vault of gold. In reality, Masius is using Jeff as bait, to tempt Sununda down from the clouds, and then turn him over in exchange for just half her gold. And so it’s back to Femina for all concerned.

There’s no real pretence at the kind of sci-fi that enthralled Barbarella audiences and none of the slick campness of Danger:Diabolik, and most of the ideas seem still-born and occasionally contradictory – in order to enslave men women must first be taught how to be irresistible to them – torture is accomplished either by whispering or kissing, and the ray-guns employed looked like cast-offs from the 1950s, but the regiment of women, with spies infiltrating everywhere, led by the ruthless Sununda, have the makings of a warrior nation.

The movie has far better luck with Masius, a splendidly-drawn character who doodles on restaurant tablecloths, enjoys reading Popeye comic books, and – a bit of drawback for a man in his profession – can’t stand the sight of blood. While his sidekicks are mostly incompetent, they do drive around in hearses that resemble pagodas or dress in unnecessary masks and while his girlfriends appear docile they are in fact spies. And there’s a spot of waterboarding in case you ever wondered where the American secret services got the idea.

The source material was from Sax Rohmer but Sununda lacks the inherent obvious evil of the author’s more successful Fu Manchu series, Shirley Eaton no match for Christopher Lee, the most recent Fu Manchu, nor Richard Shapley on a par with Fu Manchu nemesis Nayland Smith, regardless of whether played by Nigel Green (The Face of Fu Manchu, 1965), Douglas Wilmer (The Brides of Fu Manchu, 1966) or Richard Greene (The Blood of Fu Manchu, 1968, and The Castle of Fu Manchu, 1969).

And anyone attracted to the picture by director Jess (Jesus) Franco is going to be disappointed by the lack of sleaziness he exhibited in pictures like Succubus (1968), 99 Women (1969) and Marquis De Sade’s Justine (1969) and there’s not enough style, though abundant campness, to make up. It’s hard to say quite why it did not have a harder edge, perhaps producer Harry Alan Towers, responsible for 99 Women, felt it should err in the softer direction of Fu Manchu than the overt sex-and-violence of the nascent women-in-prison genre.

Franco and Towers (24 Hours to Kill, 1965, and Bang! Bang! You’re Dead!, 1966) had collaborated on The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu as well as Venus in Furs (1969) and Marquis De Sade’s Justine so presumably knew how far they could go and decided that here it was better to rein in Franco’s tendencies. Whether a tougher-edged approach would have made much of a difference given the indifferent playing – neither Shirley Eaton (The Scorpio Letters, 1967) nor Richard Stapley (Two Guns and a Coward, 1968) bring much to the leading roles and George Sanders (Warning Shot, 1967) is not in it enough to save it. Maria Rohm, Franco’s wife, appeared in many of his films.

Towers appeared on surer ground in the likes of 24 Hours to Kill (1965), Bang! Bang! You’re Dead! (1966) and Five Golden Dragons (1967) when he could draw on a more interesting cast, better stories and more colourful locations. This was a sequel to The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967) again with Shirley Eaton and plum role for Klaus kinski.

Despite the film’s potential, the director and George Sanders it does not fit into the so-bad-it’s-good category nor has enough going for it to be labelled a true cult film. But I could be wrong in both those assumptions.

Three Men To Kill! (1980) ****

Every now and then British streamer Talking Pictures TV comes up with an absolute cracker. I’d never heard of this film and don’t think it gained either a British or American release at the time and there doesn’t appear to have been anything in the way of VHS/DVD activity except a belated 2021 DVD.

Alain Delon was that rare beast, flitting between the commercial world and the arthouse with commendable ease. Luchino Visconti had hired him twice for Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963) and with his amoral screen persona he was a shoo-in for the best of French noir – Purple Noon (1960), Le Samourai (1967), The Swimming Pool (1967) and The Sicilian Clan (1969). He dipped in and out of Hollywood – Once a Thief (1965), Red Sun (1971), Scorpio (1973) and even top-billed in The Concorde…Airport ’79 (1979).

Unusually, he was in charge of his career, picking up the producer credit on 40 of his pictures, including this one, a late fit into the paranoia/conspiracy cycle as epitomized by Three Days of the Condor (1975), The Conversation (1974) and The Parallax View (1975). Though those films drew the line at car chases, bullets into the eye delivered through a keyhole and drowning people in the sea.

Unlike that trio Michel Gerfault (Alain Delon) is not involved in the espionage, surveillance or investigative business, though, if you have poor opinion of professional gamblers given such activity always seems to take place in smoke-filled rooms, you might consider his profession somewhat on the shady side, especially when he later appears conversant with guns.

Outwardly, there’s nothing amoral here. Michel is taking model girlfriend Bea (Dalila Di Lazzaro), a bouncy character putting you in mind of Goldie Hawn, to see his mother in the seaside town of Trouville, a significant move in those days if marriage was on the horizon.

Unfortunately, Michel has turned Good Samaritan, transporting a car crash victim to hospital, unaware the man, who soon dies, is one of three characters, potential whistle-blowers, on the hit list of arms dealer Emmerich (Pierre Dux). On the assumption that Michel might have been told something incriminating, killers are put on his tail.

The thugs don’t care how they kill him, happy to drown him in full view of holidaymakers splashing around in the sea. When they fail to lure him into a trap, he turns the tables, and it’s full-on pedal-to-the-metal car chases through the streets of Paris and wreckage in abandon.

After a slow start to throw you off the scent, director Jacques Deray (The Swimming Pool) doesn’t waste much time catching up and isn’t going to lose available minutes from a lean running time by sticking in such clichés as kidnapping the girlfriend.

Just how well versed Michel is in the ways of the underworld is shown in how he tracks down Mr Big who tries to pay him off and offer him a job. If Emmerich knew what we knew about Michel he wouldn’t have bothered doing anything, just called off his dogs. All Michel wants is the quiet life of a successful poker player and is not the kind of fellow to go around alerting the authorities to high-level skulduggery.

It’s a surprise ending. Except it turns out not to be the ending and this film has more in common with the conspiracy sub-genre than we imagined. Michel is out strolling in the streets soon after when he is assassinated. Sorry to be such a spoiler but these films depend for their impact on a downbeat ending.

Delon was often compared to Steve McQueen for the rare mixture of toughness and genuine charm and that’s very much to the fore here. It makes a change for him to be neither amoral nor a criminal, but his previous outings in this genre lend the supposition that he might be either. I was unfamiliar with Dallila Di Larrazza but that only meant I hadn’t been paying much attention to Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) where she played the female of the monster species. Here’s, she’s refreshing, neither femme fatale nor weighted down by trauma.

Terrific.

Lady in Cement (1969) ****

Frank Sinatra in cruise control reprises his Tony Rome (1967) private eye in a hugely enjoyable and vastly under-rated murder mystery with man mountain Dan Blocker of Bonanza fame and femme fatale Raquel Welch of pin-up fame. One of the actor’s greatest characterizations, albeit with little in it for the Oscar mob, this is one of the coolest gumshoes to hit the screen. Exhibiting none of the self-consciousness of latter-day Philip Marlowes or Sam Spades, Sinatra embellishes the character with more “business” than ever before, larding his dialogue with quips while he talks his way out of sticky situations and, as a big star, happy to be picked up by Blocker and dumped on a work surface. Can’t see Newman, Redford, McQueen, and Eastwood et al putting up with that kind of treatment.

Tony Rome is almost as much of a bum as he is a detective, betting on anything possible, wasting his time on fruitless quests for sunken treasure, lazing around in his yacht until in one of his deep sea forays comes across the naked titular damsel. Reporting the murder sees Rome co-opted by cop Lt. Santini (Richard Conte) to ID the woman. Sent to the apartment shared by Sandra Lomax and Maria Bareto in search for a potential client, Rome encounters Waldo (Dan Blocker) who hires him to find Lomax.

*The British release paired an action picture with a sex comedy, the idea being to catch different types of audiences rather than putting two action films or two comedies together which would*
later become the prevailing exhibition wisdom. *Although the two films had in common a star in bikini*.
*Note that the double bill went on general release at the same time as the two pictures*
*were, separately, playing at London’s West End.*

That takes Rome to Jilly’s go-go club where his conversation with dancer Maria (Lainie Kazan) is rudely interrupted by owner Danny Yale (Frank Raiter). Next stop is a swimming pool and who should emerge in a wet bikini than millionairess Kit Forrest (Raquel Welch) whose party Sandra attended. But a) she’s an alcoholic with memory issues and b) objects to snoopers so calls in neighbor and former hood Al Mungar (Martin Gabel) who sends Rome packing. When Maria is bumped off, Waldo is the prime suspect.

So we are enveloped in an interesting plot that soon involves blackmail and robbery and a suspect list that extends to Mungar and son Paul (Steve Peck) who has the hots for Kit, Yale and muscular boyfriend Seymour, and of course Waldo (whose reason for finding Sandra is revenge) and Kit. Despite the seeming light touch, inheritance is a theme, and the tale is character-driven, relationships complex, locales somewhat off-beat, a crap game in a mortuary, a nude painter’s studio, strip clubs, massage parlors and go-go dancing establishments abound, but with none of the moralizing that came with the territory. A racetrack is almost prosaic by comparison.

For most of the picture Santini and Rome have an antagonistic relationship until we find out, in a lovely scene, that Rome was the cop’s ex-partner, that the grumpy cop has a loving home life and that Rome is greeted with delight as “Uncle Tony” by Santini’s son. Rome is also very well acquainted with film noir and knows that a woman who appears too good to be true is in fact too good to be true so he’s sensible enough to steer clear of seduction (the bane of any film noir character’s life) unless he’s just pretending in order to glean information.

*Raquel Welch is more sedate in this poster.*

It’s a classic detective story, one lead following another, naturally a few contretemps along the way, some deception, and the laid-back Rome proves not as relaxed as you might expect, possessing a handy right hook and a neat uppercut. Interesting subsidiary characters include Al’s neglected wife, a bumptious beach attendant and a whining nude model.

Director Gordon Douglas – who handled Sinatra in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964), Tony Rome and The Detective (1968) – brings out the best in the actor, keeps the action zipping along despite multiple complications and prefers a quip to a momentous speech.

Sinatra is just so at ease he oozes screen charisma. His shamus is no slick unraveller of truth, but a steady digger, accumulating information. You might think any tentative relationship with Kit stretches the age angle a tad but bear in mind at this stage Sinatra was married to Mia Farrow, 30 years his junior. Raquel Welch (The Biggest Bundle of Them All, 1968) is surprisingly good as a vulnerable mixed-up wealthy alcoholic and, except in her opening scene, manages to steer clear of a bikini for most of the picture.

Richard Conte (Hotel, 1966) is as dependable as ever but Martin Gabel (Divorce American Style, 1967) steals the supporting show as an apoplectic racketeer trying to go straight. You might like to know Lainie Kazan (Dayton’s Devils, 1968) is still working, The Amityville Murders (2018) and Tango Shalom (2021) among her recent output. It’s a shame Dan Blocker did not live long enough (he died in 1972) to build on his idiosyncratic performance.

The lively screenplay was written by Marvin H. Albert (A Twist of Sand, 1968) and Jack Guss (Daniel Boone: Frontier Trail Rider, 1966) based on Albert’s novel. Mention, too, for the jaunty theme tune by Hugo Montenegro (The Undefeated, 1969). You’ll find yourself humming it for days on end, it pops up often enough.

Into the catchphrase hall of fame must go Blocker’s exhortation “Stay loose” just before he unleashes mayhem. And while we’re about it, what is it about the quality of actor or status of a star that permits hoodlum Al’s peeved “I tried to go clean and you dragged me down” to be ignored while a couple of decades later a similar line from The Godfather Part III (1990) uttered by Al Pacino is hailed as a classic. You know the one I mean: “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” Steven Spielberg is another who should have watched this picture for tips on how to deal with marauding sharks – Rome’s solution: kick them on the snout. By the way did Blocker fall out with imdb? Despite third billing, he’s not listed at all in the main credits and when you scroll down to the extended credits, he’s at the very bottom. Jeez!

Normal (2026) ** or (depending) – Seen at the Cinema

Say hello to the Algorithm Apocalypse. Or as we used to call it – a trainwreck of a movie. This would be a prime candidate for the Inaugural Thrash Memorial Award. Marketed as a “Sky Original” that’s somewhat misleading since it is closer to a Sky Cliché, although admittedly that doesn’t have quite the same ring.

A veritable off-piste cocktail of John Wick, True Romance, Assault on Precinct 13, and a crime version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, trade the Yakuza for the Mafia and all those films where the good cop has a nose for skulduggery.

Somewhat alleviated by a substantial side of quirkiness. We’ve got a moose on the loose, kindly bank robbers, a sheriff’s badge lifted from a corpse, an informal moustache appreciation society, problems telling pink from mauve, price gouging, and a diatribe against banks and billionaires ruining small business and small town main streets.

Cut to the violence, and there’s machine guns, pistols, shotguns and worse – flares and sticks of dynamite – and people are killed by nails, knitting needles and falling signs, and that’s before snowplows get in on the act.

Substitute sheriff Ulysses (Bob Odenkirk) takes on a temporary stint in Normal. Separated from his wife, he’s “dark inside” courtesy of shooting in cold blood a sex abuser. Not sure I quite fall in with his suspicions about the death of the man he replaced, who had the kind of extremely florid complexion you would associate with a heart attack.

Anyways, this is very much a humdrum small town with no crime to speak of and therefore a police force that verges on the acceptably incompetent until bank robbers Lori (Reena Jolley) and Keith (Brendan Fletcher), not realizing the bank doesn’t deal in much actual cash these days, demand to see the vault. Its opening alone is enough for the bank manager to kill himself, which is just as well because most likely he’d have been mown down in a hail of bullets delivered by…wait for it…the cops.

Yep, the town has a terrible secret. It’s the bagman for the Yakuza, gazillions in gold and cash stashed in the bank vault, and the whole town in on the deal, including the old lady who runs the knitting emporium and the middle-aged female barperson being set up for likely romance with the sheriff. But both are gun-toting evil wenches.

It would be one man against the mob except for Ulysses recruiting the bank robbers and the dead sheriff’s suicidal daughter Alex (Jess McLeod). So once we’re done with mystery it’s Anora all over again except with violence replacing sex. Once the Yakuza top brass fly in from Tokyo, it looks like Algorith Apocalypse is going to go nuclear except Ulysses has come up with a clever plan to settle the situation. Except it doesn’t.

I always wondered with the death of VHS and DVD and no television programs picking up the slack, how we’re ever going to find cult items. This will disappear in a year from Sky. Then where will it go? Nowhere. It’ll just vanish. You’ll never see it again. And even people who think this has cult written all over it will never be able to find enough showings of it in the future to stir the pot.

Some interesting pedigrees here – Bob Odenkirk (Nobody, 2021) proves a reliable stand-in for Liam Neeson or Jason Statham without the persona, Henry Winkler (Night Shift, 1982) shines in a supporting role and if you wondered what happened to Lena Headey after Game of Thrones (2011-2019) here’s your answer. John Wick creator Derek Kolstad doubles as writer and producer so I’m reckoning, excepting the rising gore count, there wasn’t much room left for director Ben Wheatley (Meg 2: The Trench, 2023) to put his own particular stamp on proceedings.

This comes over as a collision of two styles – a gentle quirky tale in the Fargo line that probably would have made a better mini-series and an action picture desperate for any narrative port in the storm where it could put in and without much elbow grease find a reason to embark on an orgy of violence.

Best described as the shoot-‘em-up’s shoot-‘em-up with an even higher corpse quotient than Thrash.

Somewhere between awful and highly entertaining.

10 Rillington Place (1971) ****

We tend to view Anthony Hopkins as the bold game-changer when he switched from respectable upmarket leading man to Hannibal the Erudite Cannibal in The Silence of the Lambs, paving the way for a plethora of other stars to throw off the shackles of their screen personas. But, in fact, it was another Englishman, Richard Attenborough, equally well-known for exuding principle (and raffish charm when playing a con man in Only When I Larf, 1968), who broke that particular mold.

At the time, the impetus for the picture was the miscarriage of justice which saw innocent Timothy Evans hanged for the crimes of serial killer John Christie, a name that belongs in the British murderer premier league along with the likes of Dr Crippen and Jack the Ripper. The Ludovic Kennedy book on which the film was based was by now a decade old, but it had taken that long for the British censor to clear the subject for filming and to find a star who was not already a well-known screen villain and prevent the film tipping over into sensationalism.

So although Timothy Evans (John Hurt) is the unwitting dupe, the focus is more on the cunning of the killer Christie (Richard Attenborough) who manipulates the class system. Nobody would contemplate the notion of a well-spoken upright middle-class war hero being capable of the lurid killings. And the idea of repeat victims in a Britain still rejoicing in its notions of “fair play” was equally abhorrent.

So while we don’t quite get to the nub of why Christie was so obsessed with murder, he remains a fascinating character rather than a demonic villain. And this is grubby, not tourist, post-War London where poverty is endemic and workshy ill-educated rogues are apt to be taken advantage of and easily caught.

That Christie evaded suspicion, never mind capture, for so long – his crime spree began during the London Blitz of the Second World War – was a credit to his presentation of himself as much as police disinterest or ineptitude and public disbelief at the scale of the killings. That Christie remained free for so long was because Evans was such an idiot, caught out in countless lies and eventually confessing to the crimes. You can see the connection between Christie and Hannibal Lecter (in his control of fellow prisoners) in the hold they have over the less well-educated and easily-led.

Christie, literally, got away with murder simply because, to police eyes, Evans was a more obvious villain. The narrative obscures the worst part of his tendencies, implied necrophilia and sex with unconscious women. In another life he might well have been presented as the down-on- his-luck old codger who only required a break to right himself.

The wonder of Attenborough’s performance is that he doesn’t exude menace. Even as he’s trapping victims he comes over as trustworthy. His creepiness only grows on the audience once they are invited to see the part of him that his victims do not.

It’s a testament to Attenborough’s conviction in the part that you never notice how much he loathes the character. He only took on the role as part of a campaign to prevent the return of capital punishment. Critics clearly disapproved and their plaudits were reserved for John Hurt (Sinful Davey, 1969) in the more showy role. These days, thanks to Hannibal Lecter, audiences are more inclined to be more considerate towards actors playing irredeemable characters.

Director Richard Fleischer had been here twice before with Compulsion (1959) and The Boston Strangler (1968) and to his credit that he approached it in a low-key fashion eschewing the verbal gymnastics of Orson Welles of the former and the false nose of Tony Curtis and split screen of the latter. John Hurt is excellent and Judy Geeson (Three into Two Won’t Go, 1969) has a small part.

Most films about serial killers at this point in sub-genre’s history tended to follow an investigation or a courtroom drama – Psycho (1960) while initially focusing on victim and thence the killer quickly turned into an investigation. But this is primarily concerned with the actions of the murderer, who unravels as the movie proceeds, and is brought to justice when the general finger of suspicion, rather than the result of a detailed investigation, points to him.

Richard Attenborough created the template for the outwardly-respectable killer. Interestingly, Attenborough had previously played the more typical killer, the immediately loathsome gang-leader Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1948). Written by Clive Exton (Isadora, 1968).

Well worth it to soak up the creepiness that gently begins to subsume the character.

Legends (2026) **** – Seen on Netflix

It’s astonishing that Netflix with the gazillions at their disposal can be guaranteed to generate surprise at their ability to turn out two more-than-halfway-decent series in a week. As you might expect, given this genre is their trump card, it’s another true crime venture. And in the exceptionally capable hands of Scottish writer Neil Forsyth (The Gold, 20234) it’s a cracker.

Not so unusually it’s set in the underworld arena of the British drugs trade. But, very unusually, despite the gazillions of minutes devoted to this part of the sordid genre, it takes us somewhere new. Back in time, to the 1990s. Miles away from the usual world-weary cops and instead into Customs and Excise. Miles away, too, from South East Asian, Eastern European or South American gangs, heading for the unfamiliar domain of the Turkish-dominated section of London.

You can tell when Netflix sticks out a new release under the radar. It only comes with one poster instead of several poster images. So I’m making do with the book on which it is based. Don’t ask me if the Guy named as the author is the same Guy as in the series because the television Guy comes absent a surname.

Recruitment consultants would dearly love to be able to emulate the approach of maverick customs boss Don (Steve Coogan) in selecting an undercover team to infiltrate a heroin operation. Anyone who so much as asks any questions at all is deemed surplus to requirements.

By undercover standards, the team is minute. Don in charge, gruff Guy (Tom Burke) is sent into London, Kate (Hayley Squires) and Bailey (Aml Ameen) to Liverpool with Erin (Jasmine Blackborrow) manning the desk, chasing up intel (in a pre-internet world) and keeping the woke quotient down.

Don’s boss Blake (Douglas Hodge) pops up every now and then to placate the Home Secretary (Alex Jennings) who is jumpy at allocating so much dough to a mission he’s kept in the dark about. Half the time of course the undercover agents are living on their wits, hoping they can remember every aspect of their fake lives – one mistake and on something as inconsequential as football minutiae and someone will torch your wife and child.

We don’t quite know what scars Don bears from his previous undercover outings, but while their weight condemns him to a solitary life, they come in useful when detecting whether his new charges are going to implode. Excitement and the whiff of danger seem to over-ride the prospect of personal cost.

Not surprisingly, victims come into focus. But exactly which victim does take you by surprise, especially in the face of their reaction. We watch a squaddie become hooked on heroin and when he dies the anguish on his father’s face, even half-hidden behind his spectacles, is very moving. The kicker is the dad is a heroin-dealer.

There’s various Succession tropes, as an Irish duo try to muscle in on the territory of Liverpool gangland boss Carter (Tom Hughes) and underling Zeki (Joshua Samuels) making an unwise move against the Turkish drugs leader.

In among this is a bunch of the playing of hunches and dogged detective work, the hidden clue, the unexpected missing link – you’ve acquired the code to get into a drugs stronghold, not realizing you required a different one to get out. Anytime Don is hampered by bureaucracy he takes the nuclear option and some idiot gets his ear chewed out by Blake.

What makes it work most of all is that the bulk of these characters are new to us. Their motivations remain obscure, the backgrounds rarely in focus, but when they are they can shift in the opposite direction.

The acting is first class. I never rated Steve Coogan (Saipan, 2025) before but I do now. Plummy voice is erased, tendency to overact gone and in its place a tortured human being with a mind that races along like a zipwire. Tom Burke (Black Bag, 2025) combines Steve McQueen charm with Lee Marvin menace. Douglas Hodge (We Live in Time, 2024) has taken on the Trevor Howard mantle of the character most likely to explode in fury.

But most of the plaudits should go to showrunner Neil Forsyth.

Keep it up, Netflix.

Jungle Street / Jungle Street Girls (1961) ***

More social document than thriller. Two elements make it stand out. Critics pointed to the likes of kitchen sink drama Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) as exemplifying the British working class. Equally, when looking for a picture that identified the British criminal, critics and academics were more likely to point to Robbery (1967) and Get Carter (1971) where the villains demonstrated considerable intelligence, leadership and acumen.

Let’s get the social aspects out the way first. Petty thief Terry Collins (David McCallum) still lives with his parents. He argues with his father, is mollycoddled by his mother. There’s a fry-up for breakfast. The kitchen doubles as the dining area. Excitement is limited to winning the Pools (a football-based version of the current Lottery) and going to the cinema. His father (Thomas Collins) has worked all his life shifting sacks of potatoes (presumably in a market). But he’s not disillusioned with life. He’s brought up his family and can still spend time down in the pub.

Terry is a delusional gangster. But only a part-time one, making his living working in a garage, having chucked in his factory job. He thinks he can make a big score and run off to Europe to live the high life. He’s in love with stripper Sue (Jill Ireland) who doesn’t respond to his romancing. She’s taken to stripping because her lover Johnny (Kenneth Cope) is serving a one-year stretch for a jewel robbery.

People always seem to be laughing at Terry and he reacts violently. But he’s not the rough-tough dominant male he aspires to be. Three times he gets whacked about the face, twice by criminal colleagues, once by Sue.

Inadvertently, he’s killed an old man while robbing him. So the police are on his tail. Johnny’s been released from prison, reclaiming Sue, and wants to know what happened to his share of the loot from the jewel heist in which Terry was his partner. To compensate, Terry offers to set up a robbery of the safe at the strip club whose routines he has studied.

Once the safe has been opened, he clatters Johnny over the head, and scarpers with the cash, makes for Sue, and is astonished when she refuses to accompany him. Eventually, the police catch up and another deluded petty criminal bites the dust.

Initially, of course, the audience sides with our young lad, understands his need to escape the boredom of ordinary life that awaits. But, gradually, he provides little to root for.

Given the regular sequences of girls stripping, the running time is even leaner than usual. The heist has some considerable moments of tension especially when the watchman, bound hand and foot, inches along the floor to the alarm button, and then when Terry appears trapped before jumping out a window.

There’s nothing glamorous about the strip club either, Sue having to constantly ward off the unwelcome advances of owner Jacko (John Chandos) and every other customer who thinks a stripper is morally lax. Even though she’s kept herself for Johnny, he doesn’t believe her. Some girls know how to play the system, a new stripper not giving in to Jacko until he’s spelled out the financial benefits.

The seediness of the lower depths is depicted well and it’s not hard to see how young men and young women are easily snookered into this kind of existence when the alternative is so mind-numbingly boring.

David McCallum (Sol Madrid/The Heroin Gang, 1968) and real-life wife Jill Ireland (Cold Sweat, 1970) are both convincing, exuding surprising emotional depth. Kenneth Cope (Randall and Hopkirk Deceased/My Partner the Ghost, TV series 1969-1970) is on hand to show the young ingenue what it means to be a proper tough guy.

Charles Saunders (Danger on My Side, 1962) directs from a script by Alexander Dore (The Wind of Change, 1961) and Guido Coen (Baby Love, 1969).

More interesting as a character study than as a thriller.

Should I Marry A Murderer? (2026) **** – Seen on Netflix

A great title for the most compelling true crime television tale since Staircase (2004). And for much the same reason. The main character is tricky. We are accustomed to fictional characters being economical, flexible or downright evasive when dealing with the truth and it seems that trend has spread out to non-fiction.

The odd thing is that this should be a straightforward, if tense, narrative. And it only turns into something else entirely thanks to the central character.

The story beings in 2017 when charity cyclist Tony Parsons goes missing. For some reason – in the dead of night – he’s been traversing the remote twisting narrow roads near the Bridge of Orchy in the Scottish Highlands. Despite a massive manhunt he’s never found.

Fast forward to 2020 and forensic pathologist Dr Caroline Muirhead. She’s in that neck of the woods seeking romance having met on Tinder farm worker and hunter Sandy McKellar, who lives on the private Auch Estate with twin Robert. When not skinning deer they enjoy a party lifestyle. It’s a speedy courtship. After a few months she’s engaged and in the way of many a fiancé wonders if her potential partner harbors any secrets. She’s thinking an ex-wife, maybe a couple of kids squirreled away.

She’s not expecting him to fess up to having mown down Parsons while drunk and then burying the body. Later adding, the victim was still alive, if only briefly, after being knocked down. Fear of drink driving charges clearly were behind the burying.

So now we should be into the straightforward, thrilling, part. How does our heroine impart this information to the cops? Will they even believe her? She’s no idea where the body is buried. Bear in mind, too, she’s still in love with Sandy and can’t get her head round the fact that her handsome kind six-foot Highlander could be guilty of such a deed.

So then we get to the clever bit. She gets him to indicate roughly where the body might be buried – the twins used a digger so a fair amount of earth would have been shifted – and then, inspired, she finds way to roughly mark the spot with an empty drinks can.

But then we get entangled as she gets caught up in her emotions. Instead of running a mile from a callous murderer, she continues to live with him. Sandy is pulled in for questioning but without a body the case is going nowhere. The car that knocked him down is also long gone. The police carry out a lot of spadework and there’s elements of excitement when the cops prowl around the twins’ cottage armed to the teeth like they are breaking into a terrorist stronghold.

Caroline’s parents and the cops can’t work why she hasn’t run a mile. Sandy has no idea who’s fingered him so naturally he welcomes the solace she offers. She can’t explain to camera – and it’s mostly her talking to camera – why she can’t give him up. She’s just come out of an abusive relationship but no idea the previous boyfriend was in Sandy’s league.

Whether it’s fear of Sandy finding out or fear of losing him, she begins to unravel, so much so that she jeopardizes the eventual trial when, as the star witness for the prosecution, she fails to turn up on the opening day. She’s clearly such a liability that the prosecution cut and run, dropping the murder charge in favor of a lesser charge, still a prison sentence but a lot less severe.

And still we never find out what was in her mind. It’s enigma to the nth scale. Certainly, she vulnerable. But despite solving the case and bringing the killers to justice, she’s never hailed as the heroine because the rest of her behavior remains so baffling.

Naturally, this plays like a thriller, with plenty twists along the way, so it’s an easy watch in that regard. But it’s a very difficult watch in another sense, in that plainly someone is taking advantage of a vulnerable woman who wants to tell the story her way and perhaps, as she sees it, clear her name.

Just like Staircase or the recent Michael, you wonder what else might come out if the film-makers were more rigorous in pursuit and not so hogtied to the central character.

She mixes up so much making the right decisions with taking the wrong ones that you half expect there’s going to be a terrible tragic ending.

Certainly riveting stuff and what Netflix does best.

The Parallax View (1974) ****

The shocking ending ensures the need to re-evaluate everything you have seen. The middle film in Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia trilogy – after Klute (1971) with All the President’s Men (1976) to come – is a dark (in more ways than one) reflection in essence on the John F. Kennedy assassination. The superbly stylish, on occasion over-stylised, cinematography carries an undercurrent of fear.

Ambitious reporter Joe (Warren Beatty) investigates the notion that too many witnesses, including ex-girlfriend Lee (Paula Prentiss), to a senatorial assassination have been dying. Joe’s boss Bill (Hume Cronyn), while turning up acceptable reasons for each death, reluctantly backs him. Other witnesses such as Tucker (William Daniels) have run for cover. But, as Joe soon discovers, nobody can hide forever.

Joe’s initial foray leads him to a small-time small-town Sheriff Wicker (Kelly Thorsden) with an unexpectedly large bank balance and murderous intent. Finding a link to a mysterious company the Parallax Corporation, Joe takes a written psychometric test to become a potential recruit for a company that is seeking, apparently, to find the hidden talents of under-achievers. After preventing one attempt on the life of another senator (Charles Carroll), Joe realises Parallax will stop at nothing.

Effectively, it’s a straightforward private eye number, Joe moving from character to character, building up a case. But the way Pakula frames the film, peppered with unusual scenes, turns it into an exercise in tension. One of Joe’s contacts works in a lab that is trying to train chimpanzees to play video ping-pong. Another scene takes place, disconcertedly, on a miniature train. At times we can hear every word delivered, even with the camera far away from the speakers, other times we hear nothing. Ominous music appears sparingly. Every step Joe takes in solving the mystery pushes him further into a corporate heart of darkness.

*Beatty in the bar he’s about to wreck after ordering a drink of milk.*

Joe believes Parallax are recruiting assassins but in point of fact their aim is considerably more devious. And here I don’t see how I can avoid a SPOILER ALERT. Parallax already have their assassins on board. What they are looking for are dupes, a patsy to take the blame once the killing has been done.

So when you look back from the ending what you find is that the cocky reporter is in fact exactly the kind of under-achiever the Parallax web attracts. There’s no proof of Joe’s editorial pedigree. Bill can point to any number of stories where Joe got hold of the wrong end of the stick. And the audience can see for themselves that he’s not exactly a super-brain. Sure, he can easily, with the help of a psychiatrist, pass the psychometric test, but how is he going to fare when he is linked up to some kind of machine that measures his response to visual imagery?

And you have to wonder what kind of idiot gets on a plane he suspects has a bomb on board instead of staying off the aircraft and making a phone call. Or how he managed, after surviving an explosion at sea, to swim several miles to shore and land on a beach without drawing attention to himself so that he can masquerade as a dead man.

There’s also a curious section where Joe triggers a fist fight that ends in a John Ford-style saloon-wrecking. After killing the suspicious sheriff and hijacking his car, Joe then, in true French Connection style, sparks a car chase, managing to evade his pursuers by (natch) jumping onto the back of a passing truck.

But for all these flaws, there is something hypnotic about the picture. A camera that moves with snail-like precision from extreme long shot to medium shot or close-up, a reining in of flamboyance in favor of discipline, and shadow given its biggest outing since the film noir golden era. Pakula was trying to make an obvious point about the shady authorities that exercise behind-the-scenes power. The government is either powerless or complicit, various hearings into assassinations discovering zilch. Paranoia is no less prevalent now, of course, but what makes the biggest impact is journalistic entitlement, the reporter who can change things because he is willing to go down those dark streets like an avenging angel, not realizing he is always going to one step behind.

Warren Beatty (Kaleidoscope, 1966) has lost all the acting tics, the mumbling and stuttering he used to inflict on a weaker director, and instead delivers a great performance. Which is just as well because it’s a one-man show. Paula Prentiss (Man’s Favorite Sport, 1964) barely appears before she’s bumped off. William Daniels (Two for the Road, 1967) eschews his normal harassed husband for a well-judged turn.

David Giler (Aliens, 1986) and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Three Days of the Condor, 1975) fashioned the screenplay form the novel by Loren Singer. Also worth a mention is the eerie score by Michael Small (Klute, 1971) who for a time was the go-to composer for paranoia pictures.