Undercover Agent aka Counterspy - 1953 film review

As I settled down to watch another of the long-forgotten films that have been resurrected on the excellent Talking Pictures TV channel, I was startled to see on the titles that the screenplay was based on a short story by Julian Symons. The film, Undercover Agent, is also known as Counterspy, and was released in 1953. The story it was based on is called "Criss Cross Code", but I'm unfamiliar with it, and I now plan to set about tracking it down.

Nobody ever thinks of Symons as writing espionage fiction, as the film's titles would suggest, although a few of his early short stories (and this one must have been among his very earliest) touch on international intrigue. The film is a thriller, and although it's creaky in parts, the screenplay is a lively one, co-written by Guy Elmes and Gaston Lazare (the latter name sounds as though it may possibly have been a pseudonym - I can't trace any of Lazare's other work).

The cast is a cut above the average for a British B-movie. Dermot Walsh, later to play Richard the Lionheart in a popular TV series of that name, improbably plays a meek but persistent auditor, who is called in to look over the books of a company where some mischief is afoot. His wife is played by Hazel Court, who was at the time married to Walsh in real life. The principal villain is played by Alexander Gauge, memorable in the role of Friar Tuck in the TV series Robin Hood. Here, Gauge acts rather like a poor man's Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. Hermione Baddeley plays a fortune teller, and even less likely is the casting of Bill Travers - yes, the chap from Born Free - as a brutal thug.

Yet somehow it all makes for agreeable light entertainment, mainly because the pace of the script doesn't allow one time to reflect on the daftness of it all. I'm not sure what Symons would have made of it, and I strongly suspect it bears only a limited resemblance to his story. He probably cringed, but it's no mean feat to have a short story turned into a film, even a comparatively short movie such as this one. An enjoyable curiosity..

The Scarlet Web - 1954 movie review

The Scarlet Web is a black and white British B-movie first screened in 1954, and it's a film with a number of interesting elements in its storyline - the script was written by Doreen Montgomery. It opens with quite a novel situation. A young and attractive blonde woman (Zena Marshall) parks outside a prison. Among the prisoners released for freedom is Griffith Jones. She offers him a lift - and a proposition. Will this man with a criminal past help her and her husband, a man called Dexter, to recover a compromising document?

Unfortunately, she's made a poor choice. Jones' character isn't actually a hardened criminal at all. he's an insurance investigator who has spent the past couple of months  inside on behalf of his employers, trying to find out vital information from another prisoner.  He goes along with the plan out of curiosity. But things go pear-shaped when he's drugged by his new friend, and framed for the murder of a woman who proves to be the real Mrs Dexter.

Aided and abetted by a colleague in the insurance firm (Hazel Court), our hero tries to establish his innocence and also to figure out exactly what is going on. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Dexter has a girlfriend, and that they have conspired to murder his wife for the insurance money, but proving the truth is far from easy.

This is a lively, unpretentious little film, and the appearance of those reliable supporting actors Ronnie Stevens and Michael Balfour in cameo roles is a bonus. Jones is a rather wooden hero, but the two female leads make more of an impression. Our hero soon falls for Hazel Court, and the outcome is predictable, but overall the film offers likeable light entertainment. .

The Narrowing Circle - 1955 film review

I first read Julian Symons' novel The Narrowing Circle when I was a teenager, but until recently I was unaware that in 1955 it was filmed. The screenplay was written by Doreen Montgomery, a very experienced writer for film and television, who is said to have created the character of Emma Peel for The Avengers.

The novel is a good example of post-war psychological suspense fiction. Symons was one of the British pioneers in this field, although his fiction is much less well-known than that of Patricia Highsmith,the legendary American writer, whose work he much admired. The story charts the battle of wits and wills between writer Paul Nelson and the relentless Inspector Crambo.

The film is more conventional, and in terms of both plot and style, it owes almost as much to that Cornwell Woolrich classic Phantom Lady as it does to Symons' novel. A colleague of Nelson's wins promotion at Nelson's expense, and for good measure nicks Nelson's girlfriend. When he is found dead in Nelson's apartment, Nelson relies on an alibi. He'd gone off to drown his sorrrows, picked up a prostitute, and spent the night in a seedy hotel. But when Crambo checks the alibi, the chap at the hotel denies all knowledge of Nelson, and the girl cannot be found.

The story is told with some pace, which compensates for the flimsiness of one or two of the plot twists. I don't know what Symons made of it, though I suspect he wouldn't have been thrilled by its lack of subtlety. But it's a perfectly watchable British B movie, with Paul Carpenter as Nelson and Hazel Court as a woman who falls for him and then helps solve the mystery, with such stalwarts as Basil Dignam, Russell Napier and Ronnie Stevens in the cast.