The Challenge aka It Takes a Thief - 1960 film review

The Challenge is a British film, roughly in the film noir tradition, written and directed by the prolific John  Gilling. The movie dates from 1960 and was known in the US as It Takes a Thief. Neither of the titles is particularly inspiring, and given that the lead role was allotted to Jayne Mansfield rather than Anthony Quayle, I sat down to watch it without very high hopes. I soon realised that I was actually watching a film which is surprisingly gripping, and at times rather dark and disturbing.

Quayle plays Jim Maxton, an essentially decent if rather dim widower with a young son. He is besotted with a glamorous blonde woman called Billy (Mansfield), and dreams they'll have a life together on a farm. But Billy is mixed up with a bunch of criminals, and persuades Jim to take part in a violent robbery. Things go awry, and just after Jim has hidden the loot in a remote rural location, he is picked up by the police following a tip-off. He is sent to prison, but keeps his mouth shut about his fellow villains and about where he's hidden the cash.

When he emerges from jail, the gang want their share of the money. The police are also keeping a close eye on things, as they are determined to arrest the criminals who evaded detection. Jim goes to live with his mother (Barbara Mullen) and six year old son, but things take a nasty turn when Buddy is kidnapped, and one of the gang members, a psychopath called Bud (Peter Reynolds) contemplates killing the boy.

Quayle, a fine actor, makes us root for Jim, despite his stupidity, but for  me the revelation was Jayne Mansfield. Her role is a tricky one to play, since Billy is torn between greed and a dislike of violence, and although Gilling wrote the action scenes very well, I don't think characterisation was his strength. Even so, I felt that she did a good job. Some reviews I've seen disagree, perhaps because Mansfield is widely regarded as a stereotypical "blonde bombshell", whose success owed much to assets other than her acting. On looking up her biography, however, a different picture emerges. It's apparent that she was a highly intelligent woman, gifted musically and quite a capable actress, whose looks and lifestyle probably did her no favours in the long run: she died in a car crash at the age of 34, after three marriages, countless affairs, and five children. Her performance as Billy suggests that she had genuine and significant acting talent, and it's sad that she found few roles that made the most of it     

Blackout - 1950 film

Blackout is another of those short, snappy black and white British films which the Talking Pictures TV channel has resurrected. It dates from 1950, and was an early collaboration between Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, who were later responsible, together and separately, for a host of successful TV series when I was growing up, notably the version of The Saint starring Roger Moore. Incidentally, this is an entirely different story from that in the 2007 movie also called Blackout, which I reviewed on this blog way back in 2010.

The screenplay, by John Gilling, is based on a story by Carl Nystrom, who wrote a number of TV and film stories in the post-war era. The initial premise is a version of a rather familiar, but often effective, opening to a story. A blind man turns up for an appointment, but arrives at the wrong house. He stumbles over a man's corpse, along with a sinister trio of bad guys who unwisely allow him to live because he can't recognise their faces.

Christopher Pelly is an engineer who lost his eyesight in an accident. When he tells the police about the crime he uncovered, he isn't believed, but he revisits the house where the killing took place,and befriends Patricia Dale, who turns out to be the sister of the dead man - who was supposedly killed in an aeroplane accident a year earlier. Together they determine to find out what really happened.

After a strong start,the story falters rather, and I found Pelly's refusal to involve the police sooner rather irritating. Maxwell Reed plays him in the manner of a poor man's Robert Mitchum, while Dinah Sheridan plays the plucky young Englishwoman with her usual efficiency. An interesting supporting cast includes the likes of Eric Pohlmann (later the voice of Blofeld in a couple of Bond films) as a baddie,and Campbell Singer, who was a familiar TV character actor in the 60s, as a police inspector.