Crime/Thriller – Page 3 – The Magnificent 60s

Wait Until Dark (1967) ****

You wouldn’t have figured Audrey Hepburn – she of the model looks (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) and upmarket twang and belonging to the highest echelons of the movie business – for a Scream Queen. But there were precedents – Doris Day had at times been screaming fit to burst in Midnight Lace (1960) and Lee Remick, though not in either’s marquee league, had been terrified to bits in Experiment in Terror / The Grip of Fear (1962). By this point in pictures, the screen was awash with Scream Queens, courtesy of lower-budgeted efforts from Hammer, AIP and Amicus, so asking a top star to exercise her lungs in similar fashion might have been career suicide.

As it was, which would have come as a surprise to her legion of fans, this turned out to be pretty much the star’s swansong. She wouldn’t make another movie in nearly a decade and only another three after that. But here she certainly hits a dramatic peak.

The story’s a bit muddled and initially requires unraveling. Drug mule Lisa (Samantha Jones) passes a doll packed with heroin to fellow passenger Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) on a plane. She had been planning to steal the dope and set up on her own with Mike (Richard Crenna) and former cop Carlino (Jack Weston). There’s a bit missing from the tale but you have to assume that somehow Lisa got talking to Sam and he gave her his address and that she has turned up at his apartment looking for the doll, which wasn’t there.

Mike and Carlino turn up and have no luck searching the apartment. They don’t look hard enough because if they’d looked in the closet they’d have found the corpse of Lisa, killed by her employer Roat (Alan Arkin) who arrives to confront the pair and then hire them to help him find the heroin and dispose of the body.

So with all that out of the way we come to the meat of the story. And it follows the same premise as Man in the Dark / Blind Corner (1964) – though, luckily, so few people saw that it wouldn’t be at the forefront of the audience mind at the time – of not so much a blind person being terrorized in their home but being largely played for a fool. The audience knows more than the blind person does and much of the story is not their vulnerability but just how long it will take for them to twig what’s going on.

In the case of Susy (Audrey Hepburn), as with the composer in Man in the Dark, her ears are her radar. She is on the alert after hearing the same pair of squeaky shoes on different people and wondering why people are opening and closing her blinds so often. Mike and Carlino masquerade as good guys, cops investigating the murder of Lisa for which her husband Sam is a suspect. She helps them tear apart the apartment looking for the doll.

She trusts Mike implicitly, less so Carlino, and when she starts to put two and two together she has an ally, teenager Gloria (Julie Herrod) who lives upstairs – they communicate like jailbirds by banging on the pipes. Although her eyes are denied sight, they still express her emotions – trust, relief, gratitude, fear.

But there’s not just one game of cat-and-mouse. There’s three. You know damn well that Mike and Carlino plan to squeeze Roat out of the equation just as you know damn well that he is planning to play them for patsies, apt to take revenge when double-crossed.

Gradually, her suspicions ramp up. She’s pretty smart working out the various clues. And then we hit two dramatic peaks. Firstly, when she discovers Mike is a bad guy. Secondly, when Roat kills Mike and turns on her, splashing petrol about the place, exploiting her terror of fire. She’s still got a couple of moves to turn the tables, at least temporarily but when absolute darkness does descend – she’s smashed all the lights out – and theoretically they are both in the same boat, and advantage her because of her keener hearing, it doesn’t quite work out the way she’s expected because he knows how to exploit sound.

I won’t tell you where the doll is hidden because that’s a very clever twist in itself, but apart from the few plotholes at the outset (how did Lisa manage to break into Susy’s apartment for a start and leave no trace, for example) once the narrative takes hold it exerts a very strong bite.

Audrey Hepburn is on top form. Alan Arkin (The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, 1966) and Jack Weston (Mirage, 1965) are a bit too obvious for me, but the smoother Richard Crenna (Marooned, 1969) is excellent.

Directed with both an eye to character and tension by Terence Young (Dr No, 1962) and adapted by Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington (Kaleidoscope, 1966) from the Broadway play by Frederick Knott (Dial M for Murder, 1954).

Top notch.

The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) ***

I didn’t realise that the Prohibition gangsters who invented the drive-by shooting were perfectionists. Just to be make sure of completing the job, I found out here, they might send a dozen cars one after the other rolling past the chosen restaurant/cafe, machine guns spouting hundreds of bullets. Nobody could survive that, you would think. But there was a flaw to the idea. If someone just lay down on the floor, the bullets would pass over their head. Strangely enough, we never got a potted history of the drive-by shooting in this docu-drama because otherwise we found out just about everything we needed to know about the infamous massacre.

But I did wish that the narrator would shut up once in a while. I kept on thinking we were going to be examined afterwards. Every dumb schmuck that made even a brief appearance on screen got the full bio treatment, including when – and how (not always by violence) – they died. That annoying feature aside, it was certainly a forensic examination of the whys and wherefores of the infamous gangland slaying. Rival Chicago mobsters Al Capone (Jason Robards) and Bugs Moran (Ralph Meeker), both concluding that the other was not open to negotiation, decided instead to rub him out and the movie basically follows how each develops their murderous plan.

All the big gangster names are here – it’s like a hit man’s greatest hits – Frank Nitti (Harold J. Stone), massacre mastermind Jack McGurn (Clint Ritchie) and Capone enforcer Peter Gusenberg (George Segal) – and the movie reprises some of the classic genre tropes like mashing food (sandwich this time rather than grapefruit) in a woman’s face and Capone taking a baseball bat to a traitorous underling. And there’s the usual lopsided notion of “rules,” Capone incandescent that a ganster was murdered in his own home.

Capone’s plan is the cleverest, involving recruiting people with little or no criminal record including the likes of Johnny May (Bruce Dern in a part originally assigned to Jack Nicholson), renting a garage as the massacre venue, and dressing his hoods up as cops. The film occasionally tracks back to set the scene. And the ever-vigilant narrator makes sure to identify every passing gangster but come the climax seems to run out of things to say, a good many sentences beginning with “on the last morning of the last day of his life.”

Since there’s so much money washing around, it makes sense for the ladies to try and get their share. Gusenberg’s girlfriend (Jean Hale) casually, without seeking permission, swaps one fur for another four times as expensive. A sex worker as casually steals from her client’s wallet before demanding payment for services rendered.

The only problem with bringing in so many bit characters – either those doing the murdering or being murdered – into play is that it cuts down the time remaining to cover Capone and Moran, so, apart from the voice-over, we learn little of significance, most of the drama amounting to outbursts of one kind or another. But it’s certainly very entertaining and follows the Raymond Chandler maxim of when in doubt with your story introduce a man with a gun, or in this case machine gun. The violence is episodic throughout.

Despite the authenticity, punches are pulled when it comes to the physical depiction of Capone. The man universally known as “Scarface” shows no signs of such affliction as played by Jason Robards (Hour of the Gun, 1967). Certainly, Robards shows none of the brooding intensity with which we associate Godfather and son Michael in the Coppola epic, rather he has more in common with Sonny. He delivers a one-key performance of no subtlety but since the film has no subtlety either then it’s a good fit. Ralph Meeker (The Dirty Dozen, 1967) has the better role, since being the junior gangster in terms of power he has more to fear. I felt sorry for Oscar-nominated George Segal (No Way To Treat a Lady, 1968) since although his character is there for obvious reasons there is no obvious reason why he should be allocated more screen time. And given more screen time, nobody seems to know what to do with it.

There’s a superb supporting cast including Jean Hale (In Like Flint 1967), Bruce Dern (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, 1969), Frank Silvera (Uptight, 1969), Joseph Campanella (Murder Inc., 1960) Alex Rocco (The Godfather, 1972), future director Gus Trikonis and future superstar Jack Nicholson.

After over a decade of low-budget sci-fi, horror and biker pictures, this was director Roger Corman’s biggest movie to date – his first for a major studio – and, excepting the voice-over, he does an efficient job with the script by Howard Browne (Portrait of a Mobster, 1961) who was presumably responsible for the intrusive narration.

CATCH-UP: This isn’t really a good place to start with the acting of George Segal and you will get a better idea of his talent if you check out the following films covered so far in the Blog: Act One (1963), The New Interns (1964), Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964), King Rat (1965), Lost Command (1966), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), The Bridge at Remagen (1969) and The Southern Star (1969).

Dead Heat on a Merry Go Round (1966) ****

Highly entertaining woefully underrated heist picture with an impish James Coburn (Hard Contract, 1967), Swedish Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, 1969) in a sparkling debut and at the end an outrageous twist you won’t see coming in a million years. This is the antithesis of capers of the Topkapi (1964) variety. Not only is it an all-professional job, it takes a good while before you even realise the final focus is robbery or even the actual location. There are hints about the that event and glimpses in passing of material that may be used, and although the theft is planned to intricate detail, none of that planning is revealed to the audience.

The paroled Eli Kotch (James Coburn), who has seduced the prison psychiatrist, immediately skips town and starts fleecing any woman who falls for his charms. He changes personality at the drop of a hat, fitting into the likes of the mark, and in turn is burglar, art thief, car hijacker, in order to raise the loot required to buy a set of bank plans, and yet not above taking on ordinary jobs like shoe salesman to meet the ladies and coffin escort to get free travel across the country. So adept at the minutiae of the con he even manages to impersonate a hotel guest in order to get free phone calls.

He enrols girlfriend Inger (Camilla Sparv) to act as an amateur photographer working on a “poetic essay on transient populations” to get an idea of sites he means to access. He manages to have the head of a Secret Service detail blamed for a leak. Everything is micro-managed and his final masquerade is an Australian cop with a prisoner to extradite which provides him with an excuse to linger in a police station, privy to what is going on at crucial points.

If I tell you any more I’m going to give away too much of the plot and deprive you of delight at its cleverness. The original posters did their best not to give away too much but you can rely on critics on Imdb to spoil everything.

This is just so much fun, with the slick confident Eli as a very engaging con man, the supreme manipulator, and almost in cahoots with writer-director Bernard Girardin (The Mad Room, 1969) in manipulating the audience. There are plenty films full of obfuscation just for the hell of it, or because plots are so complex there’s no room for simplification, or simply at directorial whim. But this has so much going on and Kotch so entertaining to watch that you hardly realize the tension that has been building up, not just looking forward to what exactly is the heist but also how are they going to pull it off, what other clever tricks does Kotch have up his sleeve for any eventuality, and of course, for the denouement, are they going to get away with it, or fall at the last hurdle. There is a great twist before the brilliant twist but I’m not going to tell you about that either.

There’s plenty Swinging Sixties in the background, the permissive society that Kotch is able to exploit, and yet the film has some unexpected depths. You wonder if the memories Kotch draws upon to win the sympathy of his female admirers have their basis in his own life. You are tempted to think not since he is after all a con man, but the detail is so specific it has you thinking maybe this is where his inability to trust anyone originates.

Bernard Giradin was not a name known to me I have to confess, since he was more of a television director than a big screen purveyor – prior to this he had made A Public Affair (1962) with the unheard-off Myron McCormick – and Coburn was the only big star he ever had the privilege to direct. But there are some nice directorial touches. The movie opens with a wall of shadows, there are some striking images of winter, a twist on bedroom footsie, and jabbering translators. But most of all he has the courage to stick to his guns, not feeling obliged to have Kotch spill out everything to a colleague or girl, either to boast of his brilliance, or to reveal innermost nerves, or, worse, to fulfil audience need. There’s an almost documentary feel to the whole enterprise.

James Coburn is superb. Sure, we get the teeth, the wide grin, but I sometimes felt all the smiling was unnecessary, almost a short cut to winning audience favour, and this portrayal, with the smile less in evidence, feels more intimate, more seductive. This may well be his best, most winning, performance. Camilla Sparv is something of a surprise, nothing like the ice queen of future movies, very much an ordinary girl delighted to be falling in love, and with a writer of all the things, the man of her dreams.

The excellent supporting cast includes Marian McCargo (The Undefeated, 1969), Aldo Ray (The Power, 1968), Robert Webber (The Dirty Dozen, 1967), Todd Armstrong (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963) and of course a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance of Harrison Ford as the only bellboy (that’s a clue) in the picture. You might also spot showbiz legend Rose Marie (The Jazz Singer, 1927).

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue (2025) or ** (depending)

Ludicrous production values point this in the direction of a laughable project, but a clever twist on both the detection picture and the survival genre and a heck of a lot of fun once it gets into the swing tilt this into the So Bad It’s Good category and a four-star rating for that.

Maybe there’s some of that post-ironic modernist stuff flying around in that we’re not meant to take the setting seriously. How could you when the only attempts to fill out the background of the Mexican jungle are one snake, one lizard and one crow and a pool of barracuda (yep, you heard me, somebody’s got to be able to chew off, for narrative purposes, a human face). Occasionally, reminiscent of the worst of the B-picture horror movies where actors had to strangle themselves with plastic snakes, here the characters take it in turns to slap their faces at supposed insects.

*Other morgues you might be interested in…*

But they’re never covered in sweat and there’s nary a tarantula or rattlesnake in sight. And any time one of them is due to be bumped off, they just have to wander away from camp.

This sets out its stall in disaster movie fashion. In classics like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1074) and Earthquake (1974) part of the fun was working out who would bite the dust.

Here, we’re told at the outset that out of the ten people aboard a light aircraft that’s crashed into the jungle nine don’t make it. So, over six episodes, we’ve got to guess who’s the survivor as well as why he or she feels obliged to get rid of his fellow passengers and it’s not as simple as in Sands of the Kalahari (1965) where it’s simply to increase one individual’s food stock.

Nor is it a simple matter of checking the billing. We know that Paul Newman and Steve McQueen aren’t going to be victims in The Towering Inferno, likewise Charlton Heston in Earthquake, but here none of the cast is familiar in the slightest, so no fans are going to bitch at their beloved idol being killed off, though Game of Thrones showed little compunction.

*“The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue” should you be interested.*

Naturally, the one creature that’s dominant in the jungle is the red herring. Virtually every character isn’t what they seem. Kevin (Eric McCormack), an ex-doctor, feels like somewhere along the line he’s been struck off; Zack (David Ajala) is certainly no insurance investigator; Dan (Adam Long) isn’t a novelist; millionaire’s daughter Amy (Jan Le) clearly has issues; Lisa (Siobhan MacSweeney) ain’t no ordinary housewife; and everyone’s suspicious of Sonja (Lydia Wilson) because she’s so guarded.

Alliances crumble once the body count rises. And gradually, the survivors realize they are not alone, there’s someone else in this neck of the jungle who will sabotage their efforts to set up a rudimentary transmitter. It’s not Flight of the Phoenix (1965) either or those others in the survival sub-genre where characters use their skills to find an escape. This lot do nothing more energetic than wait. Though they don’t have much energy left over after all their confrontations and squabbling over who’s the killer among them.

What writer Anthony Horowitz (Foyle’s War, 2002-2025) does brilliantly is take the hoary old detective tale and turn it upside down. Sure, we’re accustomed to multiple murders in virtually any episode of a television mystery, but setting the bar as high as nine killings, and telling us that fact from the off, making us wonder who will be next – a bit like Strictly, wondering who will be axed this week – provides this with the narrative fillip it requires.

And you forget about the lousy production values and go with the flow. Here and there sub-plots turn up the puzzle factor.

You may well, like me (he boasted), work out who the killer is and what he’s up to, but likely as not you won’t.

Apart from a marvelous turn from Siobhan MacSweeny, the dry head nun from the Derry Girls (2018) television series, nobody’s called upon to do much acting, except of the duplicitous kind as they keep their real characters under wraps.

Couple of good twists at the end.

Guilty pleasure (four-stars) or utter rubbish (two stars) – you choose.

Catch it on BBC and various streamers or on DVD.

Man in the Dark / Blind Corner (1964) ***

Hammer Scream Queens rarely make an impact outside the genre, so it comes as something of a surprise to find Barbara Shelley effortlessly making the transition from The Gorgon (1964) to a slinky femme fatale spinning a deadly web around three men. While British femme fatales tend not to go all-out full throttle in terms of seduction and revenge, that suits the set-up here which is distinctly slow-burn. In fact, you might be persuaded to accuse the production of time-wasting or padding-out the story with its occasional diversions into song numbers (though that is a trope of these B-features) until you discover later on that there’s a very good reason for listening to the dulcet tones of pop singer Ronnie Carroll.

While there are echoes of Faces in the Dark (1960), blind composer Paul (William Sylvester) here is a far more sympathetic character especially once audiences latch on to what he as to put up with. And where Wait until Dark (1967) majors on terror, here the approach is much more subtle. And while audiences might wince at Audrey Hepburn’s predicament, here they will be appalled to see Paul’s wife Anne (Barbara Shelley) virtually taunt him by not just parading her secret lover Ricky (Alexander Davion), a penniless artist, but caressing him and pecking his cheek with kisses as if to test her husband’s radar.

Not only is Paul the forgiving type – turning a blind eye to his wife’s regular late nights – but he is devoted to Anne and considers himself lucky that she has stuck by him and it never occurs to him that his wealth plays a significant part in that bargain, Anne, a little-known former actress, unlikely to enjoy such bounty any other way. He’s so in love with his wife that he knocks back his secretary Joan (Elizabeth Shepherd) who has a good idea her employer is being played for a fool.

Under the guise of Ricky painting her portrait, Anne manages to legitimately spend a considerable amount of time with her lover and fine-tune her plans to rid herself of Paul. There’s a fairly easy option. Paul is an alcoholic and given to standing in an open balcony. He could easily lose his footing and topple over should there be someone around to give him the initial nudge.

Ricky is pencilled in as the murderer. And though he initially baulks at the idea, the prospect of both losing Anne and resolving at the same time his financial problems is too tempting. By now, Paul is aware of the tryst, having been alerted to the couple smooching in a restaurant, by his best pal and manager Mike (Mark Eden). Once we realize that Paul has been taping his wife’s telephone conversations, you are misdirected into thinking he will be better prepared. But this isn’t America or even sleazy Soho and there’s not a gun to hand or even a knife so Paul is vulnerable to an assailant and even as weak-minded an individual as Ricky seems to grow in confidence the minute the tussling begins.

Even then Ricky is so incompetent Paul needs to coach him into how to get away with the perfect murder and once we get to this stage it’s clear there’s something else going on and we’re in for a torrent of twists, delectably delivered. Ricky is informed that he’s a patsy, that Anne is in love with Mike and that in a courtroom she will act her socks off as the innocent victim of an overzealous lover – “a choked sob will escape her – she did that in The Act of Cain” or “she might fall into a crumpled but not unattractive faint” as she did in Murder Undaunted.”

When Anne arrives, accompanied by Mike, to check on Ricky’s handiwork, the game is clearly up. But Paul has police hidden in the bedroom to hear what amounts to Anne’s confession. All three are locked up and Paul heads off into the sunset with his secretary.

Barbara Shelley creates a sizzling tension of her own and is a superb femme fatale, dangling three men on a string. Alexander Davion (Paranoiac, 1963) and Mark Eden (Curse of the Crimson Altar, 1968) don’t get a look-in though simply by being stoic and then clever William Sylvester (Devils of Darkness, 1965) manages to hold his own.

Quite a different proposition to Tomorrow at Ten (1963), also helmed by Lance Comfort, where the tension is upfront. You’d say this was a weighted piece of direction, with much of the pressure in the early stages reliant on whether Paul will see through his wife. Those scenes where she toys as much with her lover as her husband are unique. Written by the team of James Kelly and Peter Miller (Tomorrow at Ten) plus Vivian Kemble (Olympus Force, 1988).

Takes a while to come to the boil but well worth the wait.

Catch it on Talking Pictures TV under the title Blind Corner.

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) ****

It always helps a prison picture if your character has been wrongfully convicted (The Shawshank Redemption, 1994) or is incarcerated through an unfortunately set of circumstances including self-destructive tendencies (Cool Hand Luke, 1967). Whatever the case, the malevolence of the wardens or the emergence of his own engaging personality will ensure that your character is sprinkled with enough sympathy to transform into our hero.

But that’s not the case here and it takes a strong chunk of bravura acting from Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry, 1960) to pull this off.

Oddly, this works in the main not because it’s your typical prison picture with endless confrontations with guards and preventing your dignity being sliced and diced by a ton of humiliating actions. Walt Disney couldn’t have done a better job of hooking the audience with its nature true-life approach. I guarantee you will be chuckling to watch a newborn chick trying to shuck off the top half of its egg.

Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster), a pimp, was certainly no innocent, a two-time killer, who only escapes execution through the efforts of his mother (Thelma Ritter) in persuading U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to commute his sentence. However, there is an evil Catch-22 which infuriated prison governor Harvey Shoemaker (Karl Malden) invokes. While awaiting sentence, and assuming execution is inevitable because he murdered a prison guard in front of hundreds of witnesses, the local judge has decreed that Stroud should be kept in solitary confinement.

Shoemaker, nettled by Stroud’s defiance, interprets that as being able to keep the prisoner in solitary confinement for the rest of his term – which amounts, as it happens, to 40 years. None of this bugs Stroud that much. He’s averse to human companionship, as likely to bully a cellmate and cause ructions elsewhere, and certainly not ever going to give in to the prison system with its endless rules.

The marketeers have taken some liberties with the title. But Alcatraz is certainly a bigger lure to moviegoers than Leavenworth. By the time Stroud reaches Alcatraz he’s devoid of birds. All the breeding activity takes place in Leavenworth.

And while there are aspects of Stroud’s character you will never warm to, he’s got us hooked the minute he embarks on the bird breeding, in part because it’s the antithesis of his character to be so humane, and in part because the dedication involved in painstakingly building cages or other toys (a little wooden chariot a bird is taught to drive) from nothing but wooden boxes with rudimentary tools he has fashioned himself is wondrous to behold. That section of the movie is just enthralling.

Although he’s rescued a chick from a broken nest that lands in the prisoner courtyard during a storm, it takes him a while to cotton on that the bird needs fed, which he does with his version of a toothpick. He coaxes the frightened bird to fly and eventually starts breeding the damn things, persuading a new governor to allow him to buy birdseed and encourages his hobby, so much so that after extensive study Stroud becomes a noted ornithologist with a couple of publications to his name. His case became widely known after a bird researcher Stella Johnson (Betty Field) publicizes his activities and eventually marries him.

But when he’s shifted to Alcatraz, he encounters Shoemaker who forbids the birds. So Stroud starts to write a history of the U.S. penal system. Despite being prone to violence, he is instrumental in ending a prisoner uprising. He is never released, despite various petitions.

So while there’s no happy ending it’s an absorbing picture. Burt Lancaster is at the top of his form, winning another Oscar nomination. Telly Savalas (Crooks and Coronets, 1969), playing another prisoner, was also nominated. Karl Malden (One Eyed Jacks, 1961) is an excellent foil and any time Thelma Ritter (A New Kind of Love, 1963) pops up she steals the show.

While it’s on the long side for a prison picture and lacks the epic quality that the 150-minute running time would suggest, director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) takes an almost documentary approach to his subject. You might call it an intimate epic. Screenplay by Guy Trosper (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1965) from the book by Thomas E. Gaddis.

Standout show from Lancaster.

Tomorrow at Ten (1962) ****

Surprisingly hardnosed for a British crime thriller. Surprisingly stylish and when the sting in the tail comes, it’s an emotional one, adding a deeper level to one of the main characters. In most crime picture – wherever they originate, Britain, Hollywood, France, Italy – the detectives may well complain to their colleagues about their superiors but they never take them on head-to-head and again and again. For that element alone, this is well worth watching.

The opening has you hooked, way head of its time, you would be more likely to see this type of approach in a picture from a top-name director, Alfred Hitchcock for example. A man, Marlowe (Robert Shaw) enters a derelict detached house carrying three parcels. He climbs a flight of stairs. With a key he opens a locked door. It might be a bedsit it’s so scarcely furnished except for the child’s bed. He sits down at the table, empties out two bottles of milk and some food. He opens a long parcel wrapped in paper and takes out a stuffed toy. He flips it over on its stomach, cuts open its back, pulls out the stuffing and from his last parcel removes a small bomb which he places in the empty space.

(At this point I have to explain that the toy is a gollywog, an innocent enough toy at the time but which has different connotations now, so is rarely mentioned, but this particular type of toy has a bearing on the plot, so forgive me if I make further mention of it.)

Next time we see him he’s wearing a chauffer’s uniform, picking up a small boy, Jonathan, (Piers Bishop) to take to school. Only, as you’ll have gathered, he has another destination in mind, but takes care not to frighten the child, to keep him distracted to the extent of the child thinking there’s nothing untoward as he is taken upstairs. He’s delighted with the toy, and not, at this point, too worried to be left alone.

Meanwhile, at the boy’s house, nanny Mrs Robinson (Helen Cherry) receives a telephone call from the school asking where the boy is. Just as the perplexed widowed father Anthony Chester (Alec Clunes) is given the news, Marlowe, now dressed in a suit, and carrying a Gladstone bag, appears at the door. Anthony greets him by name.

In the study Marlowe explains he has kidnapped the son, requires £50,000 in ransom, has planted a bomb set to go off the next morning at ten o’clock (hence the title), but will only release details of the child’s whereabouts once he is out of the country. Chester, a millionaire, has no qualms about paying up. Marlow is as cool as a cucumber. He has come up with the perfect crime. He will get off scot-free, become instantly rich and no one will come to any harm.

Except the nanny is listening at the door and dials 999. The local cops call in Scotland Yard. Assistant Commissioner Bewley (Alan Wheatley) assigns the case to Detective Inspector Parnell (John Gregson) quickly revealed as a tough nut, threatening to turn a suspect in a jewel robbery loose so that his pals will think he’s squealed and exact vengeance.

By the time, he reaches the house, Chester has gone off to withdraw the cash from the bank. Inside, Parnell confronts Marlowe. And so begins a game of cat-and-mouse. Marlowe holds firm, believing that the cop will give in to save the child, Parnell searches for a psychological weakness in the criminal’s makeup that he can use to crack him. Each convinced of their own mental strength in a battle with an innocent life at stake.

Chester returns with the money and is furious to discover the cop. When Parnell refuses to play along with handing over the cash to the kidnapper, Chester pulls out his ace, the old boys network, calling up Bewley, asking for Parnell to be removed from the case. Bewley, happy to do a favor for a wealthy pal, agrees. But Parnell refuses to go.

Bewley goes in person to confront his insubordinate officer. Still, Parnell refuses to budge, verbally attacking his smug superior, threatening to go to the newspapers.

While the pair are arguing, Chester loses his rag, physically attacking Marlowe. In the struggle, Marlowe falls back, hits his head and falls unconscious. Bewley, who has reluctantly agreed to let Parnell continue, now responds with spiteful glee. The cop will carry the can if the child dies.

Chester, meanwhile, is calling in the top medical experts to save Marlowe, money no object. But Parnell can’t afford to wait and enlarges the inquiry, putting out a public appeal, Marlowe’s face on the front page of the evening newspaper. But every other investigation can’t be halted just for this case, so Parnell is frustrated when various beat cops, originally going door-to-door, are pulled off onto other case.

Meanwhile, we already know Jonathan has worked out something is wrong, But the window is sealed with steel mesh and the door is locked and eventually he goes to sleep cuddling the deadly toy.

Marlowe shows no sign of recovery and dies. Bewley ups the stakes against Parnell. A beat cop looks at the outside of the house in question but walks away. Parnell gets a tip-off that leads him to a nightclub called the Gollywog Club and encounters Marlowe’s parents who run the place. Their name is Maddow. They haven’t seen their son in several months and while they accept he’s a criminal, the mother reminisces about what a loving boy he was.

Eventually, Parnell finds the estate agent who rented the property to Marlowe. By now they have just five minutes to get to the property.

They arrive a few minutes after the deadline.

But Jonathan has inadvertently saved his own skin, and ironically the plan has backfired because of Marlowe’s insistence on hiding the bomb in a stuffed toy of sentimental value rather than secreting it in a cupboard or somewhere the child would not have looked, and even if he found it wouldn’t know what it was.

After waking up Jonathan has washed his face and hands and decides the toy could do with a bit of tidying up the same so dunks it in a sink full of water, thus nullifying the bomb.

Parnell goes home, welcomed by wife and – child the same age as Jonathan.

So, yes, much of the tale is par for the course, several twists to up the tension, but Parnell’s duels with his boss put this on a different level, and the realisation at the end that he has managed to set aside the feelings for his own child. And it’s also elevated by the direction of veteran Lance Comfort (Devils of Darkness, 1965) who takes time out – in an era when such features were usually cut to the bone – to add atmosphere. The first and last scenes are outstanding for different reasons and the two verbal duels make for a fascinating movie.

Stronger cast than most in this budget category – John Gregson (Faces in the Dark, 1960) and Robert Shaw (Jaws, 1975) bring cool steel to the affair.

Though little-know, Tomorrow at Ten has been acclaimed as one of the top 15 British crime pictures made between 1945 and 1970 and I wholeheartedly agree.

Another welcome revival from Talking Pictures TV.

Kaleidoscope (1966) ***

Amazing the tension that emanates from the turn of a card. Or, more correctly, waiting for one. Only problem is we’re two-third through the movie before high-stakes poker begins – the pot nudging £250,00 (close on a cool £5 million now). Mostly, the earlier tension derives from not knowing what the hell is going on in this enjoyable thriller made at the height of the Swinging Sixties as playboy gambler Barney (Warren Beatty), a walking Carnaby St model driving an Aston Martin DB5, tilts the odds dramatically in his favor.

Barney is a gambler but the problem with gambling is the odds. They can be against you too much. So Barney decides to turn himself into a burglar, the kind that can clamber over rooftops, abseil between buildings, and break into – a printing business called Kaleidoscope. This just happens to print the playing cards supplied to all the major European casinos. So Barney does a little doctoring of the master printing plates. Bingo, the odds are a bit more even now that he knows what cards are coming out of the shoe – he plays chemin de fer (as it is known in posh casinos, pontoon or 21 to you and me).

While cleaning up he bumps again into fashion designer Angel (Susannah York) – their original meet-cute taking place in a traffic jam – who he dated once in London. Unbeknownst to him, she is on a scouting mission, looking to snare the kind of high-rolling gambler who can take on and completely fleece the drugs kingpin Harry (Eric Porter) being pursued by cop Manny (Clive Revill), her father who, rather than waste so much time collecting the required evidence to put the villain behind bars, decides it would easier done by making him broke. Unable to pay his debts, some other villain would put him out of business in the traditional cemented-boot fashion.

It takes a while for the movie to line up all its ducks in a row, mainly by holding on to the information the audience requires. But the audience is privy to details of the way Manny works that Barney is not. Even for ruthless villains, Manny has a peculiar calling card, one that would make any gambler think twice about entering his lair. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Manny to rumble Barney’s game so the stakes are much higher than the charming gambler imagines.

Throw in as much fashion as London was capable of generating at this time, the burgeoning romance, some exotic European locations, a castle with a moat, and the usual tourist guide stuff of red buses, Big Ben, Piccadilly Circus, pubs and Tower Bridge and you have all the ingredients of an easy on the eye thriller.

It’s a movie that relies on star power but Beatty and York deliver. That is, if you don’t need Beatty to do much more than be Beatty, all teeth and charm. At this point in his career Beatty looked as if his career was fast approaching its end. The box office success of Splendor in the Grass (1961) had been followed by a string of flops, romantic dramas and comedies that should have had audiences queuing up plus an occasional wild card like Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965), the biggest flop of all. He does make an engaging crook, and he never loses his screen charisma here, but there ain’t quite the right number of twists that moviegoers weaned on the likes of Topkapi (1964) had come to expect.

Hollywood had been doing its best to position Susannah York as a top box office attraction and she had snagged the female lead in The 7^th Dawn (1964) opposite William Holden and Stanley Baker in Sands of the Kalahari (1965) but she was recovering from the colossal flop of Scruggs (1965) by ‘poet of the cinema’ David Hart. Kaleidoscope offered the kind of role York could do with her eyes closed. So while the screen pair were not exactly sleep-walking it was not the kind of story that was going to create sparks.

Character actor Clive Revill (Fathom, 1967) and Eric Portman (The Pumpkin Eater, 1964) take more leeway with their roles, the latter almost chewing he scenery, the former content with just chewing his lips. Look out for Jane Birkin (Blow-Up, 1966) and British television stalwarts Yootha Joyce, George Sewell and John Junkin.

The title would have been more enigmatic, original meaning of images twisted out of shape, had it not also applied, straightforwardly, to the card-making company. Giving Harry the surname of Dominion seems overkill.

Director Jack Smight (No Way to Treat a Lady, 1969) came to this after twisty private eye picture Harper/The Moving Target (1966), a big hit starring Paul Newman. This is too lightweight a feature to command such interest, but he does keep the story rolling along and it’s an effortless watch and it has a certain offbeat quality. The screenplay was fashioned by Robert Harrington and Jane-Howard Harrington, making their movie debut, who also co-wrote Wait until Dark (1967). It was also the debut for Winkast Productions, the Jerry Gershwin-Elliott Kastner production team who went on to make Where Eagles Dare (1968).

One Battle after Another (2025) **

Sorry to be a party-pooper but I didn’t take to this critically-acclaimed shaggy dog story heavy on the satire. It’s partly redeemed by the performances – Sean Penn, in particular – but there’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said, and far more succinctly, about immigration and the rising right-wing influence in America. I’m sure Leonardo DiCaprio’s $20-$30 million standard remuneration fee might account for a good chunk of the $130 million budget but unless rates for extras have soared I can’t see where the rest of the money has gone.

Perhaps Warner Bros, having lost out on cult box office hotshot Christopher Oppenheimer, was hoping to replace him with Paul Thomas Anderson, who while generally a critical darling, has none of Oppenheimer’s box office clout. Though let’s not forget Anderson’s highly rated by his peers, otherwise how to explain his three Oscar nominations for direction and four for writing. He should be a good fit for the wild unwieldy sprawling works of Thomas Pynchon, another cult darling, and his previous effort Inherent Vice (2014) made a reasonable stab at capturing, albeit on a smaller scale, the author’s idiosyncrasy, though the writer as often took the blunderbuss approach to his subject.

The only element of directorial bravura that I detected here was the Cinerama effect of mounting and falling down hills in the car chase.

The tale is just lame. Revolutionaries grow old or turn snitch to save their skin. White old guys belong to some secret racist organisation going by the name of the Santa Claus Club or some such. Black gals get to kill people and rattle off machine guns. The nuns, as you might guess, are another secret organisation. The main element of the narrative appears to be whether racist Col Slackjaw – I mean Lockjaw (Sean Penn) – but I mean, who cares, when you give the bad guy such an improbable name you’re stating from the outset that he’s a joke and not the threat he’s meant to be

Anyway, improbable as it sounds, the avowed racist has a thing for dominant Black women – check out his erection at first sight of gun-toting Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and his predilection for being anally probed by her. She’s sometime revolutionary, sometime aforementioned snitch, sometime boyfriend of revolutionary-cum-hophead Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), and definitely not maternal material given she walks out on new-born Deandra (Regina Hall) leaving the hophead to bring her up.

The Santa Claus Club gets wind of the fact that Lockjaw might not be as racist as he pretends so that sets it at odds with its very own top racist as he embarks on a scorched-earth quest to find out if he should have a paternal bone in his body.

All sorts of chases ensue, mostly revolving around one-dimensional characters though Benicio del Toro makes a fair stab at humanizing his revolutionary.

It just went on and on, like a latter-day Anora (2023), making same point over and over again, albeit that presumably it is aimed at the intelligent section of the cinematic audience who shouldn’t need to be battered over the head with the message. This is the kind of picture which complains about the treatment of people by the Santa Claus Club but then expects audiences to burst into a round of applause when the club meets out punishment to one of its own.

File under major disappointment.

Leonardo DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023) is good, but there’s not much for him to get his teeth into, we’ve seen this deadbeat character so many times before, even ones that form emotional ties with their children.

Black Rabbit (2025) ***

I’ve never been a big fan of either Jude Law (Firebrand, 2023) or Jason Bateman (Game Night, 2018) so I admit I’m coming to this Netflix series with some hesitation. Despite his deuce of Oscar nominations I’ve never been convinced by Jude Law as an actor – he always seems to me one of the actors who “acts.” And sticking a beard on Jason Bateman and growing his hair long does not turn him into a badass. He’s directing himself here, at least for the two opening episodes, so I’m not sure he’s cracked that skill either.

And I can’t be the only one fed up with these movies or series that start at the end. You get some decent piece of action – here a robbery – and no sooner have you become interested than the action stops dead and up pops the legend “one month earlier” or “one week earlier” or “one day earlier” as if someone has got it into their heads that that automatically adds a hefty dose of tension.

So, basically, this looks like some sort of whodunit. Not revolving around murder as would normally be the case. But around the aforementioned robbery which has the hallmarks of an inside job. Possibly the finger won’t point at Jake Friedkin (Jude Law) who is after all the restaurant co-owner. More likely, you’d suspect his hustler brother Vince (Jason Bateman) who you learn in short order has stolen his father’s collection of rare coins, taken out loans against the family property, killed a guy and owes $140,000 to loan sharks.

But that last large debt brings Jake solidly into the frame. He’s had to, according to one of those unwritten laws that get trotted out at convenient times in gangster pictures, assume his brother’s debt. Worse, he’s not able to pay his own bills, a born hustler, has his eye on a bigger prize and just has to raise the presumably insignificant sum of $5 million to set up another more upmarket operation in a building built by Mies van der Rohe (famous architect in case you don’t know).

He’s planning to take his head chef Roxie (Amaka Okafur) with him so you’d think she wouldn’t bear a grudge. But, in fact, she’s pretty pissed off at her boss because he’s taken no action to prevent the sexual predatory activities of his partner Wes (Sope Dirisu), a successful recording artist who drinks the place dry (of high-priced champagne I should add). Wes has raped bartender Anna (Abbey Lee) and she’s been sacked and already taking revenge on TikTok.

*Hey guys, I’d just like to point out that two guys running ain’t exactly poster material.*

Jake has hired Wes’s interior designer girlfriend Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman) to give the new place a decent lick of paint, but Wes, who’s not in on the deal, has discovered his partner is soon going to be his ex-partner.

So from there on, every possible attempt to jack up the stakes occurs. Vince wins enough ($150,000) at the gambling tables to pay off his debt, but that wouldn’t make much of a story nor be true to his character, and he loses it all. And when the sale of the family property falls through he’s back to square one and the digital accounting begins – as in digit accounting as a hot-headed gangster saws off his little finger. Oh, and promises that next on the hit list would be Vince’s estranged daughter Gen (Odessa Young) a tattoo artist.

There’s a big chunk of back story to be fitted in. Jake was originally Wes’s manager, Vince was responsible for coming up with the idea of turning a derelict dump into a trendy bar and restaurant. So emotional debt is owed all round never mind the $140,000 outstanding plus whatever else Jake has clocked up.

So part The Bear, part sub-Scorsese with psychopathic hoods, and part the double-dealing that comes with running any business and soon enough I guess there will be a proper murder to deal with because glancing down the cast list I see a detective so that will be more suspects.

I’m not entirely sure there’s enough here to keep me pinned down in my seat for another six episodes. And part of the problem, I guess, is the all-action beginning which had me believing this wouldn’t just degenerate into a slow, draggy family saga (more family based than usual given the restaurant we are told is one big family). Created by Zach Beylin (Creed III, 2023).

I’m not optimistic.