Cat Girl.

In the late 1950's and 1960's London born Barbara Kowin, better known to the film going public as Barbara Shelley, became Hammer Horror's number one female star and there after the leading lady of British Horror. Appearing in such films as Blood of the Vampire (1958), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966), Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). But before this successful run of horror classics she starred in the remake of the 1942 Jacques Tourneur directed and Val Lewton produced film of the same name Cat People.

 

The wonderful Barbara Shelley (left).

This 1957 update of the supernatural chiller stars Shelley as Leonora Johnson who is instructed to return to her ancestral home by her Uncle (Ernest Milton) where she is informed that she is the heir to the family curse which involves being possessed by the spirit of a leopard! Neither her husband, her friends or her ex lover psychiatrist Dr Brian Marlowe (Robert Ayres) believe in the curse and put her ever increasingly strange behaviour down to her mental state brought on by her husbands unfaithfulness. Dr Marlowe then commits her to a sanatorium, will this incarceration cure her suspected insanity or is there a lot more to the family curse?

 

A cat fight?

Although this low budget B-movie is far from a classic it has as its saving grace a leading lady whose convincing performance is well above the work produced by her co-stars. The Daily Cinema called her performance ‘blood curdling’, with Kinematograph Weekly describing it as ‘A hectic amalgam of savagery and sex’

Best known for being script editor of the 1971 TV drama Upstairs, Downstairs, which was must see viewing in the early part of the 1970's, and the pop revue 6.5 Special (1958) Alfred Shaughnessy directed this grand example of British gothic cinema with ingredients of ‘erotic sex and violent horror combined’[1] – well for 1957 anyway.  

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[1] The British ‘B’ Movie. Steve Chibnall, Brian McFarlane.

Devil Girl from Mars.

On a winters evening, an assortment of guests are sitting down to their evening meal at an isolated Scottish inn when suddenly a brilliant light descends. Out on the remote moorlands a spaceship has landed. From the craft descends Nyah - a latex clad dominatrix. When the hotel guests try and get help they discover that not only are the telephone’s down but our Ann Summers clad alien has erected an invisible force field around the house and garden. The reason this woman has travelled 340 million miles from Mars is to replenish the far off planet with male breeding stock following a devastating war between the sexes in which the male population had been wiped out. With the help of Chani a monstrous robot that resembles a fridge on legs, she forces the hotel patrons into a night of terror that demands a sacrifice of one of their number to save the rest.

 

Hazel Court with Latex clad Alien. 

This gem of a British B-movie was adapted from a stage play and has a grand line up led by the wonderful Patricia Laffan as the ruthless ray gun toting Martian who had previously appeared opposite Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr in the 1951 MGM epic Quo Vadis. B-movie queen Hazel Court plays the London model Ellen Prestwick who has escaped to the Scottish Highlands following an unhappy love affair. Also marooned at the inn are Professor Arnold Hennessy a metallurgical expert played by Joseph Tomelty and the special correspondent Michael Carter played by Hugh McDermott. Peter Reynolds is an escaped convict whose girlfriend Adrienne Corri works at the bar of The Bonnie Charlie Inn. John Laurie and Sophie Stewart, who seem to get all the best lines, play the husband and wife who run this remote Inn.

The sensual Patricia Laffan. 

Produced by the American brothers Edward J and Harry Lee Danziger for Danziger Productions, who did not have a good reputation in the British film making circles, and directed by Scottish filmmaker David MacDonald who after some considerable success in the 1930's and 40's was reduced to making B-movies in the 1950's for the Danziger's.

 

Chani the Robot. 

Although Devil Girl from Mars has its faults it is a prime example of high camp 1950's British science fiction at its trashy best mainly, in my opinion, because of the sensuality and erotic nature of the lead character which puts a different dimension on the film which at the time was seen as a warning about letting women's emancipation 'go to far'.  The Monthly Film Bulletin's review from June 1954 opines,  "Settings, dialogue, characterisation and special effects are of a low order; but even their modest unreality has its charm. There is really no fault in this film that one would like to see eliminated. Everything in its way is quite perfect" As another critic pointed out this is one of those cult movies that is loved for its badness, a film that gives a great deal of pleasure to a certain type of appreciative viewer who does not demand high art, but love’s movies like Slave Girls (1967) or Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988).

Undercover Agent aka Counterspy

Husband and wife team Dermot Walsh and Hazel Court star in Vernon Sewell’s (The Man in the Back Seat) 1953 cold war drama Undercover Agent, which was wildly known as Counterspy. The drama begins when we witness papers stolen from a safe in a large country house. Dermot Walsh plays the accountant Manning who unwittingly becomes involved in a spy ring that are hell bent on passing the secret plans for a new jet engine, along with the details of a new material out of which it will be constructed, on to a foreign power. Hazel Court plays his anxious wife.

Dermot Walsh was a promising actor who like many stars of this period had more success in B-movies than he did in main features, his wife, who had spent the 40’s in ‘A’ films, also found more fame as the sophisticated lady of the B-movies in the 1950’s.  

 

Hazel Court and Dermot Walsh.

Well received by the critics with the general consensus being that it was “a typical thriller with an unusual impact” At times the ‘queer goings on’ can feel a little bit like amateur theatricals but it’s genuinely not a bad film. Hermione Braddeley as Del Mar and Alexander Guage as a Sydney Greenstreet type villain add to its authenticity. We also get treated to an exciting chase round the Fun Fair at the Festival Pleasure Gardens Battersea Park that would eventually become known as Battersea Fun Fair, which did not close until the mid 1970’s.

 

Things turn nasty!!

Guy Elmes and Gaston Lazare wrote the screenplay based on a short story Criss Cross Code by Julian Symons. The DOP was A T Dinsdale who also worked with Ken Hughes on Timeslip (1955) and the music was by Eric Spear, best known for composing the original theme tune for the British soap Coronation Street which it is alleged he was paid the princely sum of six pound. The quaintly named William H Williams produced it. 

Cash on Demand.

Quentin Lawrence’s best film of his career was the highly rated B-movie, made in 1961 and released in 1963, called Cash on Demand. The film was adapted from a 1960 TV play written by Jacques Gillies and called The Gold Inside. This exciting and very well structured Hammer production was shot by one of that studio’s most notable camera men Arthur Grant who made a great contribution to the build up of sustained suspense. His restrained approach gave the provincial bank, where nearly all the action takes place, a repressive ordinariness, which was crucial to this excellent low-key thriller[1]. 

The films plot involves a small local bank in Haversham and it’s the 23^rd December. The manager Harry Fordyce is one of the old school, no Christmas cards on display and certainly no decorations pointing out to his subservient staff that “banking is a dignified business and needs to stay that way” and as usual he will not be attending the staff party.  He is an arrogant man who demands that his staff run the bank by the book. Fordyce is also at loggerheads with his chief cashier Pearson who he has never got on with and threatens to sack him over another staff members silly mistake. The manager’s unfeeling efficiency is not appreciated by any of the staff that consider they work under unnecessary duress. On the morning in question the bank opens as normal, staff arrive at 9:45 and get the bank ready to open by 10oclock. The manager is in his office when he is informed that Colonel Gore Hepburn from the banks insurance company has arrived to check on the banks security practises. After he has had a good look around the public areas he join’s Fordyce in his office and tells Pearson that there not to be disturbed. It at this point that our branch manager is informed by Hepburn that he is really there to relieve the strong room of £93000. He informs Fordyce that unless he helps him rob his own bank the manager’s wife and son, who are being held hostage in their own home, will be harmed. Obviously Harry Fordyce must do as he is told - whatever the cost!

 

Fordyce does not get on with his chief cashier.

Peter Cushing is striking in what is possible one of his best roles as the Ebenezer Scrooge like character Harry Fordyce, with Andre Morell as Gore Hepburn who played this part in the original TV production and Richard Vernon who gives a career best performance as Pearson. Also playing their part are Edith Sharpe, Norman Bird and Barry Lowe as the other bank staff. This movie is up there with the very finest of British B-movie’s and certainly is one of the best Hammer has made. Although the film is principally about a bank hoist it does very well in the emotional stakes highlighting the relationship between the tyrannical manager and his staff which is as important, to the story, as the bank robbery which does not, incidentally, rely on physical brutality to underpin the threat of violence.

 

A life changing moment for the Bank Manager.

The film was made at Hammers, Bray Studio located near Maidenhead in Berkshire England. The producer was Michael Carreras, son of the founder of Hammer Studios and responsible for directing Slave Girls (1967). For some unexplained reason the original UK release of Cash on Demand had a running time of sixty-six minutes where as the USA release was just short of ninety minutes.

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[1] The British B Film. Stevie Chibnell and Brian McFarlane 2009.