Campbell’s Kingdom.

In-between the Ralph Thomas directed and Betty Box produced movies Doctor at Large (1957) and Tale of Two Cities (1958) Dirk Bogarde played Scotsman Bruce Campbell in a British adventure film Campbell’s Kingdom (1957). Campbell had been told he has only six months to live; he has an unnamed terminal disease. Following this devastating piece of news he then finds out that he has inherited a small valley in the Canadian Rocky Mountains known as Campbell’s Kingdom from his grandfather. Before the old man died in suspicious circumstances he was convinced that his land had a rich vain of oil beneath it. But when Bruce arrives from England he discovers that the land is to be flooded on completion of a nearby dam, which means he only has a short time to determine if his grandfather was correct and save the valley. The dam is being built by a corrupt construction contractor Owen Morgan (a menacing Stanley Baker) who will stop at nothing to finish the dam even if it means resorting to dirty tricks to stop Campbell proving that there is oil on his land and therefore preventing the flooding of the valley.

 

Bruce Campbell as portrayed by Dirk Bogarde.

Assisting Bogarde in his quest is Barbara Murray who plays the daughter of old man Campbell’s crooked partner, who had swindled the locals out of their savings, and Bruce’s love interest Jean Lucas. Michael Craig plays the geologist Boy Bladen. James Robertson Justice, with a dubious Scottish accent, play’s a drilling contractor whose willing to risk every thing on Bladen geology results, the ones that Owen Morgan has been suspected of tampering with!

 

Some of the supporting stars including Sid James.

Set in the Alberta, the movie was shot in the Italian Dolomites and at the Pinewood Studios in England. The movie was seen at the time as an attempt to emulate Hollywood’s western genre action films but most critics of the period did not think it succeeded. Returning to it now it turns out to be a very satisfying watch. It was based on a cracking old fashioned adventure yarn written by Hammond Innes in 1952 and adapted by Robin Estridge. With a great cast and an exciting climax its well worth 102 minutes of your time. Another significant release from Network.

  

The Good Die Young.

I have previously mentioned British film director Lewis Gilbert when writing about Cast A Dark Shadow (1955), which you will remember, starred Dirk Bogarde and Margaret Lockwood. Gilbert’s best known films includes Alfie (1966) which was adapted from a Bill Naughton's play and starred Michael Caine as the sixties icon. Later work included Educating Rita in 1983, which again featured Caine, Shirley Valentine (1989) and three James Bond films; You Only Live Twice (1967), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979).

Another of the 40 plus films he directed was the British noir crime thriller The Good Die Young (1954) jointly adapted for the screen by Gilbert and Vernon Harris based on a novel of the same name by Richard Macaulay. Filmed mainly at the Shepperton Studios with the climax filmed at Heathrow Airport. It included an American/Canadian/British cast.

 

Four men 'up to no good'.

The film opens with four men sitting in a large saloon car clearly up to no good, (the men not the car) something that’s reinforced when handguns are handed out. These four men, two British and two American, have apparently only known each other for four weeks. The spoken narrative informs us that they all have clean criminal records; it then goes on to explain how each of these very different individuals came to be sitting in the car.

Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart) a clerk has flown to Britain to find out why his wife Mary (a twenty year old Joan Collins) has not returned from a two weeks holiday in the UK where she went to look after her mother who had been ill.  Mary’s mother (Freda Jackson) is insecure and noticeably unstable and does not approve of Joe and wants nothing more than to keep her daughter in the UK and split the couple up. But Joe who finds out his pretty young wife is pregnant wants to return to New York with her as soon as he can get the plane fare together.

 

Each man needs an injection of money to solve his immediate problems!

Mike Morgan (the ever dependable Stanley Baker) an ex-navy man who realises he has come to the end of his relatively unsuccessful career as a boxer and needs just one more fight to increase his total savings to £1000 which he believes is enough money for him to retire and live happily ever after with his caring wife Angela (Rene Ray). But Angela has a younger brother who is forever on the wrong side of the law. When his sister puts up to bail money for his release he skips the country and Mike and Angela loose all their savings.  Even if he wanted too, Mike couldn’t go back in the ring because following an accident his hand was amputated, in fact Mike is finding it imposable to find any kind of employment.

Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) is an American air force Sargent who is about to be transferred from his base in the UK to one in Germany, but the fly in the ointment is his unfaithful actress wife Denise (the sultry femme fatale Gloria Grahame) who will not go with him because of her career, but Eddie suspects that its more to do with her leading man Tod Maslin (Lee Patterson). Eddie goes AWOL and needs to get away from both the UK and his unfaithful wife.

 

Problems are not always of your own making.

Miles ‘Rave’ Ravenscroft (Laurence Harvey) has a very rich father and a very rich and sophisticated wife Eve (Harvey’s wife to-be Margaret Leighton). But Rave indulges in extramarital affairs and sponges off his wife to pay his gambling debts. But Eve refuses to settle up his latest liability that is owed to a rather unscrupulous villain who will stop at nothing to get his money. Even his father will not cough up the required dosh.  Rave needs to raise some money - quickly.   

This atmospheric suspense drama boasts a very cleverly constructed story that gradually unravels as the film progresses and manages to keep a tight grip on your attention span for its 94 minute running time. In my opinion it benefits from changing the novels original location from America to 1950’s England where it’s made obvious that the four main characters are still reeling from the end of WW2.  It’s not just the main personalities involved in this drama that are extremely well cast but also the rest of the company, who fit their roles like a well tailored pair of gloves. These include Susan Shaw, Robert Morley and Leslie Dwyer. 

The Man Who Finally Died.

Although the Network DVD seems to have been well received when it was released in July 2013, I found it disappointing. Even with a talented cast on show, which included Stanley Baker, Peter Cushing, Mai Zetterling, Eric Portman and in smaller rolls Nigel Green and Alfred Burke most of whom, with varying success, attempting to speak with German accents. I felt that The Man Who Finally Died (1962) did not rise above a rather lumbering mystery drama. In fact most of the cast were a little stilted in their portrayal of characters that were first seen in a 1959 Television series. Two 30-minute episodes of which were shown in September of that year. The first called The Call and the other called The Gloves with Quentin Lawrence, who was also responsible for directing the feature film, directing The Call.

 

The plot thickens!

Lawrence was best known for his TV work on episodes of series like The Avengers, Danger Man and The Baron. Except for a highly rated B-movie made in 1961 called Cash on Demand his remaining body of work in feature films was not well received and The Man Who Finally Died is particular uninspired. This cold war tale does not build up the tension a story like this deserves.

 

Baker with Georgina Ward.

Stanley Baker plays a London based jazz musician called Joe Newman, a naturalised Briton who has lived in England since the beginning of WW2. This individual deserved a more emotional portrayal from Baker that would have given a more demonstrative feel to the character. Newman always assumed that his German father had been killed on the Russian front twenty years ago but he receives a telephone call from the Bavarian town of Konigsbaded from a man calling himself Kurt Deutsch – the name of his dead father! Traveling to the German town Newman uncovers a mystery that gets ever deeper, and one that certainly confuses not only Joe Newman but also this blogger!  ‘But his search for the truth proves more disturbing than he could ever imagined’[1] Not quite I’m afraid!!

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[1] Network DVD Notes.

Blind Date.

As I have said before Joseph Losey, along with Ben Barzman, was listed by the House of Un-American Activities as communist sympathisers and both took up residence in Britain. Losey settled in London in January1953 and thereafter made some of the best British films of the 1950’s and 60’s some of which can be accessed on my blog by clicking on this Joseph Losey link.

 

The suspect being questioned by the future head of C15. 

In any other directors hands Blind Date (1959) would have been a conventional British crime drama but as Robert Murphy[1] so rightly points out Losey, with the help of Barzman’s co-written screenplay adapted from Leigh Howards novel Chance Meeting, transforms it into a ‘critique of a repressive class ridden society’ He goes on to explain that in The Servant, King and Country, Accident and The Go-Betweens his [Losey] treatment of the English class system is always that of an outsider, fascinated and slightly appalled, in Blind Date despite its French femme fatale and its Dutch leading character is bolder and more polemical. Its remarkable in the fact that it is the only one of Losey’s films to validate his left wing credentials.

 

The 'victim' and the suspect.

The directors handling of the two working class characters were exceptional. Inspector Morgan (the wonderful  Stanley Baker) is the son of a chauffeur and appears to have worked his way through the ranks of the police force the ‘hard way’ and has an uneasy relationship with his middle class colleagues and his superiors. He is told in no uncertain terms that to get any further in his career he must develop a deeper understanding of public service, in other words cowl down to his so called betters and perhaps join the ‘Lodge” which Morgan does not appear to be able, or want, to do! The second working class character is our suspected murderer Jan Van Rooyen (Hardy Kruger) the son of a coal miner and a penniless artist who develops a weakness for our murdered femme fatale, one Jacqueline Cousteau (Paris born Micheline Presle). 

 

Inspector Morgan doing his job. 

We first meet our Dutch artist on his way to a date at the Clive Mews flat of Ms Cousteau, when he arrives the front door is open, he enters closely followed by the police who discover the dead body of the French woman lying covered up on her bed. The hard-bitten Welsh detective Inspector Morgan begins his interrogation of his number one suspect. We are transported back in time to explain the relationship between the rather dislikable Jan and the victim, how they met, her visits to his rented studio, and how Jan fell in love and became enchanted with this beautifully alluring older woman.

 

Joseph Losey with Hardy Kruger and Micheline Presle.

I may admittedly be a little biased due to my high regard for the director but urge you to see this more than acceptable crime drama, which as I have said previously not only emphasises exquisitely the British class structure it gives a credible portrait of a love affair of ‘convenience’ between rich and poor, and also underlining how in the British movie industry at that period the portrayal of the police was becoming ever more realistic and far less flattering than the cosy world portrayed in earlier ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ type features.

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[1] Sixties British Cinema Robert Murphy.