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. 

The Shakedown.

Renown Pictures Ltd, which were originally founded by George Minter in 1938, is a Production and Distribution company that revives British classic movies and whose restoration of British B-movies is exceptional giving the viewer a chance to see rare films in clarity beyond reproach. And it’s done it again with The Shakedown (1959), another ‘missing’ B-movie which boasts a solid story, played out with a strong cast and could easily be mistaken for the main feature at 89 minutes with an exciting pace that does not falter from start to finish.

 

Augie Cortona (Terence Morgan) instructs one of the models. 

Written and directed by Toronto born John Lemont who entered the film industry in 1935 and worked with the Army Film Unit during WW2. His first feature film was not until 1954 and his best-known is the crime drama The Frightened City (1962) that stared a pre-Bond Sean Connery as a villain. He also worked a great deal in Television.

 

Jessel (Donald Pleasence) 

As far as I’m aware this is the first time that The Shakedown has appeared anywhere on DVD. It stars Terence Morgan (Tread Softly Stranger 1958) as a crook called Augie Cortona who is due for release from prison and shares a cell with a petty crook called David Spelligue (Bill Owen There Was a Young Lady 1953, Dancing With Crime 1947).  Before Augie was incarcerated he run a call girl racket in Soho, London’s red light district. Grassed up by his disloyal partner Goller (a foreign looking Harry H Corbett!) who now runs all of Augie’s previous rackets – but the released jail bird wants them back, or at least to find away of getting back at his ex partner. To this end he robs two of Goller’s henchmen of their latest takings, the proceeds of which are more than enough to set up a photo-modelling agency with Jessel (Donald Pleasence Hell is the City 1969) a professional photographer, who Augie met quite by accident in a public house! 

Thats no way to treat an ex alcoholic! 

Is our ex pimp going straight? Chief Inspector Bob Jarvis (Robert Beatty) certainly does not think so and puts an undercover officer in to the studio. But unbeknown to both the police and Augie, Goller has also placed a plant in the agency. Augustus Cortona’s hard shell falters when he falls for one of the studio’s high-class models Mildred Eyde (the stylish B-movie queen Hazel Court) and starts up a courtship.

 

Augie's courtship of Mildred Eyde (Hazel Court) 

Well shot, this gritty realistic black and white movie is a must for crime film lovers and ‘is possessed of a gumption worthy of the best American B-movie and a welcome alternative to those prim and stodgy British films that are mistakenly called classics’[1] A rather risqué film with its hint of nudity and an indication of elicit sex. It also manages to capture the same sordid and gritty feel of Michael Powell’s classic Peeping Tom (1960), which is praise in its self.

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[1] James Oliver – Offbeat