CaptainWaggett

Excellent article about British b-movies by Matthew Sweet in today's Guardian. Let's hope there's a season to accompany the BBC4 documentary.

All the fun of the fleapit



Once upon a time, you could stroll into a cinema and enjoy a cheap yet thrilling pleasure we're now denied: the British B-movie. Matthew Sweet looks back on a low-budget golden age

Friday March 14, 2008
The Guardian


Cheap thrill ... Brit B-movie Cover Girl Killer


These days, every movie has to be an event - even when everyone who made it and promoted it knows it's a complete non-event. You see the billboards and the ads. You read the puff-pieces by the PR company's tame hacks. You watch the red-carpet premiere on TV. You take the plastic model of the lead character out of your Kinder Egg. You are convinced, by the weight of all this material, that missing out on the experience of seeing the film would be an act of cultural irresponsibility, like failing to notice who won the Republican nomination for the presidency of the US. So you pay the best part of a tenner to be part of it all - and sit in the gloom assuaging your disappointment with a £3.99 box of popcorn. And then, six months later, you buy the DVD.

There was a time when people went on blind dates with movies; when you turned up at the cinema, just as Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson do in Brief Encounter, took your place in the fuggy dark and waited to see what the management would throw at you. Not just the main feature, but a whole package of supplementary material: newsreel, animation, maybe a live musical performance, and the ne plus ultra of modest, hypeless, unpretentious entertainment - the British B-movie.For most of the last century, the B-movie gave the British cinema-going public something for nothing. Often it wasn't much: a crime flick about a slow robbery conducted in an office lined with box-files; a documentary about the East Coast Railway; a thriller with the name of Spencer Teakle above the credits, or some other North American nobody, in the unlikely hope of selling the picture across the pond. They were films that British audiences watched, enjoyed and left behind, never expecting to see again.

And yet, the cheapness and the marginality of these films is now the very thing that makes them seem so rich. In the past year, I've watched hundreds of the things, and come to love their bargain-bucket pleasures. I've seen Joan Crawford playing light orchestral music to the missing link in Trog. I've seen Harry H Corbett in a slippery black toupee and beer-bottle specs, murdering his way through 1950s Soho in Cover Girl Killer. I've seen Jill Esmond, the first Mrs Laurence Olivier, as the crusading heroine of Private Information, on a mission to make her local council concede the shortcomings of the sewage system under her brand new postwar housing estate. ("The subterranean pipe-joints are insecure!" is her battle cry.) I've seen an intoxicatingly low-key thriller called Smokescreen (made to support the Elvis musical Roustabout), which stars Peter Vaughan as an insurance investigator sniffing around a dodgy claim for a Hillman Imp that trundled off Beachy Head. I've seen an S&M scene in which a very young and tightly dinner-jacketed Johnny Mills writhes on the sofa under the whip-hand of his old dad. (The film is The Lash. It was made for a few thousand quid in 1934, and it preaches the morality of an earlier age: that moral recuperation is only a thrashing away.)

Pictures at the bottom of the bill offered diversions that were substantially different from the movies they supported. They were free to deal with subjects beneath the dignity or the notice of expensive films - and to show us a picture of this country that now seems more shabbily accurate that the glossed-up world you're sold in contemporaneous A-films.

Observe, say, 1950s Britain through its top-of-the-bill films and it emerges as a land populated by pipe-smoking, twentysomething men who drive vintage Bentleys, usually with Muriel Pavlow in the back. Explore it from the bottom of the bill and you'll encounter something different: tracts of featureless industrial estates, a world in which Wolseley police cars clatter under railway bridges in Croydon and mid-price actors occupy frowsty suburban drags. It is threadbare, unspectacular territory, where compromised people spend their time committing adultery and double-crossing each other, often while drinking pre-mixed American cocktails.

There is, for instance, no UK A-picture comparable to Marilyn (1953), in which Sandra Dorne - the poor producer's Diana Dors - plays the libidinous wife of a middle-aged service station owner in a drama that's like Zola transplanted to the side of a B-road in Berkshire. Oblivious to the passion of her lesbian housemaid, she begins an affair with Maxwell Reed, a grease-smeared sex monkey her husband has foolishly employed to work the pumps. But this is just one step on the road towards her ultimate ambition - to transform their grim little transport caff into an upscale martini bar. Naturally, it all ends in tears and murder and retribution. But you get the impression that this cheap little film - and many others like it from the 1950s - are channelling something fundamental to the postwar British experience. Like Britain itself, the B-movie could not afford to realise its dreams and fantasies, and so turned frustrated desire into one of its main sources of inspiration.

This artistic and financial pragmatism bred its own species of producer. Men such as Herman Cohen, who, for the 1960s monster flick Konga, secured permission to close Croydon High Street and stage a battle between the British army and a giant gorilla - thanks to the gift of a colour television set, sent round to the chief constable. Men such as Edwin J Fancey, a razor-sharp talent-spotter who gave Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan their first film roles, shot a drama of the Canadian Rockies a few miles outside Glasgow, and persuaded unwilling crew members to work overtime by threatening to punch them in the face. Fancey's reputation was a global one: when reporters asked Charlie Chaplin why he had come to visit England in the 1950s, he replied, "To sue that bastard EJ Fancey." (Fancey, it seems, had been distributing Chaplin's films without the proper permissions.)

Fanceyan wiliness was absolutely necessary, however, to make a useful profit from B-movies. Budgets were so modest that actors were usually asked to supply their own costumes. But they could sometimes turn that to their own advantage. Terence Longdon, the suave leading man of dozens of low-budget British features, remembers the grumbling and kerfuffle on the set of Clash By Night when Peter Sallis - cast, incidentally, as a pyromaniac kiddie-fiddler - turned up on the first day of shooting in an unnaturally white rollneck jumper. In the finished film, the jumper is the luminous centre of every shot in which Sallis appears, allowing him to steal the picture from under the noses of his colleagues.

Television now supplies us with throwaway drama. We will never again see films as modest as Clash By Night or Marilyn or Private Information. And that's because cinema is not the casual pleasure it was for much of the 20th century. It is no longer part of the diurnal rhythm of our national life, when the act of spending a few hours in the cheap seats at the Regal required as little forethought as the act of writing home or eating fish on Friday. Now, huge swathes of the population simply don't go. And when was the last time you dispensed with the astrological side of a night at the pictures: the totting-up of critical stars, the divination of screening-times, the observation of the trajectories of actors and directors? No, I can't remember either. But the B-movies that survive are a sweet reminder of the time when going to the pictures wasn't a treat.

In Brief Encounter, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson settle into their seats at the Carnforth fleapit and, through the miasma produced by an audience sucking busily at their Capstan filters, they receive a pleasant surprise: a Donald Duck cartoon. Celia watches and laughs and coos in praise of his "dreadful energy and his blind frustrated rages". Then the main feature looms up. They don't like the look of it. So they get up and leave the cinema. They don't ask for their money back. They don't moan about how they've been ripped off. They just go, easily and casually. I think I envy them for that.

From B-movies to A-list
The stars who emerged from the British B-movie circuit
Vivien Leigh
Four years before she snogged Clark Gable in the lustrous Technicolor expanses of Gone With the Wind, Vivien Leigh got her first break in a couple of B-movies for Paramount British: The Village Squire and Gentleman's Agreement. The producer who spotted her, Anthony Havelock Allan, had a motto, "the best of everything at the lowest possible price", and, in 1935, Leigh fit the bill. In later years, she flatly denied that her services had ever been so cheap.
Errol Flynn
Before his screen test at Teddington studios, Errol Flynn borrowed a fiver from a friend to buy himself a secondhand sports jacket. He went into the audition a nobody from Tasmania and came out a star - or at least an actor with a leading part in an inexpensive thriller, set in Monte Carlo but shot entirely in south-west London. A few months later, Warner Brothers shipped him to Hollywood. In four years' time, he was squeezing into Robin Hood's tights - and sent a cheque for a fiver (plus interest) across the Atlantic.
David Lean
The future director of Lawrence of Arabia learned the proper use of a razor blade while cutting bottom-of-the-bill flicks in the 1930s. One sharp little number he edited is Dangerous Ground, a thriller from 1934 in which the killer is caught by the clever use of a concealed Dictaphone. You sense the quality from the opening scene, in which a gang of policemen swarm into a drinking den in the depths of Deptford and cheerfully beat up a suspect. (We're not supposed to disapprove.)
John Mills
In the 1930s, directors of supporting features found an enthusiastic star in little Johnny Mills, even if they did have to lay him on a sofa or put him on a flight of stairs during love scenes with actresses who were, inevitably, rather taller. He is the chirpy juvenile lead in a cheap little mystery called The Ghost Camera, but his finest B-movie hour comes in The Lash, in which he plays a permanently sloshed posh boy who spends too much time at the club, and then gets his girlfriend into one.
Margaret Rutherford
That Alpine swoop of hair, the great angler-fish jaw, the eyes narrowed in indignation: Margaret Rutherford is perhaps our greatest character star. She learned her shtick in a series of modest little pictures shot at Twickenham studios in the 1930s. Maybe the parts were a bit more various, too, than they later became. In Dusty Ermine, she plays the head of a forgery gang; in Beauty and the Barge, she gets a love scene.
Jack Hawkins
Fresh-faced and careful to insert that obligatory extra "y" between the first and second letters of the word "darling", Jack Hawkins was a well-spoken, heroic lead in dozens of modestly priced interwar movies. The most intoxicatingly odd is called A Shot in the Dark, in which he plays a man who believes he may have killed the local vicar by accidentally pushing him into a pit of slime. Fortunately, the man is saved from death by some sports equipment. "It was lucky," one of his fellow actors remarks, "that your golf clubs wedged across it."
· Matthew Sweet's documentary Truly, Madly, Cheaply: British B-Movies will be broadcast on BBC4 in June

batman

Good article .... he mentions Max in Marilyn (great film).

This is at the bottom of the page ....

"Matthew Sweet's documentary Truly, Madly, Cheaply: British B-Movies will be broadcast on BBC4 in June."

julian_craster

All the fun of the fleapit

Once upon a time, you could stroll into a cinema and enjoy a cheap yet thrilling pleasure we're now denied: the British B-movie. Matthew Sweet looks back on a low-budget golden age

Friday March 14, 2008
The Guardian

All the fun of the fleapit | Features | guardian.co.uk Film


These days, every movie has to be an event - even when everyone who made it and promoted it knows it's a complete non-event. You see the billboards and the ads. You read the puff-pieces by the PR company's tame hacks. You watch the red-carpet premiere on TV. You take the plastic model of the lead character out of your Kinder Egg. You are convinced, by the weight of all this material, that missing out on the experience of seeing the film would be an act of cultural irresponsibility, like failing to notice who won the Republican nomination for the presidency of the US. So you pay the best part of a tenner to be part of it all - and sit in the gloom assuaging your disappointment with a £3.99 box of popcorn. And then, six months later, you buy the DVD.

Article continues
There was a time when people went on blind dates with movies; when you turned up at the cinema, just as Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson do in Brief Encounter, took your place in the fuggy dark and waited to see what the management would throw at you. Not just the main feature, but a whole package of supplementary material: newsreel, animation, maybe a live musical performance, and the ne plus ultra of modest, hypeless, unpretentious entertainment - the British B-movie.

For most of the last century, the B-movie gave the British cinema-going public something for nothing. Often it wasn't much: a crime flick about a slow robbery conducted in an office lined with box-files; a documentary about the East Coast Railway; a thriller with the name of Spencer Teakle above the credits, or some other North American nobody, in the unlikely hope of selling the picture across the pond. They were films that British audiences watched, enjoyed and left behind, never expecting to see again.

And yet, the cheapness and the marginality of these films is now the very thing that makes them seem so rich. In the past year, I've watched hundreds of the things, and come to love their bargain-bucket pleasures. I've seen Joan Crawford playing light orchestral music to the missing link in Trog. I've seen Harry H Corbett in a slippery black toupee and beer-bottle specs, murdering his way through 1950s Soho in Cover Girl Killer. I've seen Jill Esmond, the first Mrs Laurence Olivier, as the crusading heroine of Private Information, on a mission to make her local council concede the shortcomings of the sewage system under her brand new postwar housing estate. ("The subterranean pipe-joints are insecure!" is her battle cry.) I've seen an intoxicatingly low-key thriller called Smokescreen (made to support the Elvis musical Roustabout), which stars Peter Vaughan as an insurance investigator sniffing around a dodgy claim for a Hillman Imp that trundled off Beachy Head. I've seen an S&M scene in which a very young and tightly dinner-jacketed Johnny Mills writhes on the sofa under the whip-hand of his old dad. (The film is The Lash. It was made for a few thousand quid in 1934, and it preaches the morality of an earlier age: that moral recuperation is only a thrashing away.)

Pictures at the bottom of the bill offered diversions that were substantially different from the movies they supported. They were free to deal with subjects beneath the dignity or the notice of expensive films - and to show us a picture of this country that now seems more shabbily accurate that the glossed-up world you're sold in contemporaneous A-films.

Observe, say, 1950s Britain through its top-of-the-bill films and it emerges as a land populated by pipe-smoking, twentysomething men who drive vintage Bentleys, usually with Muriel Pavlow in the back. Explore it from the bottom of the bill and you'll encounter something different: tracts of featureless industrial estates, a world in which Wolseley police cars clatter under railway bridges in Croydon and mid-price actors occupy frowsty suburban drags. It is threadbare, unspectacular territory, where compromised people spend their time committing adultery and double-crossing each other, often while drinking pre-mixed American cocktails.

There is, for instance, no UK A-picture comparable to Marilyn (1953), in which Sandra Dorne - the poor producer's Diana Dors - plays the libidinous wife of a middle-aged service station owner in a drama that's like Zola transplanted to the side of a B-road in Berkshire. Oblivious to the passion of her lesbian housemaid, she begins an affair with Maxwell Reed, a grease-smeared sex monkey her husband has foolishly employed to work the pumps. But this is just one step on the road towards her ultimate ambition - to transform their grim little transport caff into an upscale martini bar. Naturally, it all ends in tears and murder and retribution. But you get the impression that this cheap little film - and many others like it from the 1950s - are channelling something fundamental to the postwar British experience. Like Britain itself, the B-movie could not afford to realise its dreams and fantasies, and so turned frustrated desire into one of its main sources of inspiration.

This artistic and financial pragmatism bred its own species of producer. Men such as Herman Cohen, who, for the 1960s monster flick Konga, secured permission to close Croydon High Street and stage a battle between the British army and a giant gorilla - thanks to the gift of a colour television set, sent round to the chief constable. Men such as Edwin J Fancey, a razor-sharp talent-spotter who gave Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan their first film roles, shot a drama of the Canadian Rockies a few miles outside Glasgow, and persuaded unwilling crew members to work overtime by threatening to punch them in the face. Fancey's reputation was a global one: when reporters asked Charlie Chaplin why he had come to visit England in the 1950s, he replied, "To sue that bastard EJ Fancey." (Fancey, it seems, had been distributing Chaplin's films without the proper permissions.)

Fanceyan wiliness was absolutely necessary, however, to make a useful profit from B-movies. Budgets were so modest that actors were usually asked to supply their own costumes. But they could sometimes turn that to their own advantage. Terence Longdon, the suave leading man of dozens of low-budget British features, remembers the grumbling and kerfuffle on the set of Clash By Night when Peter Sallis - cast, incidentally, as a pyromaniac kiddie-fiddler - turned up on the first day of shooting in an unnaturally white rollneck jumper. In the finished film, the jumper is the luminous centre of every shot in which Sallis appears, allowing him to steal the picture from under the noses of his colleagues.

Television now supplies us with throwaway drama. We will never again see films as modest as Clash By Night or Marilyn or Private Information. And that's because cinema is not the casual pleasure it was for much of the 20th century. It is no longer part of the diurnal rhythm of our national life, when the act of spending a few hours in the cheap seats at the Regal required as little forethought as the act of writing home or eating fish on Friday. Now, huge swathes of the population simply don't go. And when was the last time you dispensed with the astrological side of a night at the pictures: the totting-up of critical stars, the divination of screening-times, the observation of the trajectories of actors and directors? No, I can't remember either. But the B-movies that survive are a sweet reminder of the time when going to the pictures wasn't a treat.

In Brief Encounter, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson settle into their seats at the Carnforth fleapit and, through the miasma produced by an audience sucking busily at their Capstan filters, they receive a pleasant surprise: a Donald Duck cartoon. Celia watches and laughs and coos in praise of his "dreadful energy and his blind frustrated rages". Then the main feature looms up. They don't like the look of it. So they get up and leave the cinema. They don't ask for their money back. They don't moan about how they've been ripped off. They just go, easily and casually. I think I envy them for that.

From B-movies to A-list

The stars who emerged from the British B-movie circuit

Vivien Leigh

Four years before she snogged Clark Gable in the lustrous Technicolor expanses of Gone With the Wind, Vivien Leigh got her first break in a couple of B-movies for Paramount British: The Village Squire and Gentleman's Agreement. The producer who spotted her, Anthony Havelock Allan, had a motto, "the best of everything at the lowest possible price", and, in 1935, Leigh fit the bill. In later years, she flatly denied that her services had ever been so cheap.

Errol Flynn

Before his screen test at Teddington studios, Errol Flynn borrowed a fiver from a friend to buy himself a secondhand sports jacket. He went into the audition a nobody from Tasmania and came out a star - or at least an actor with a leading part in an inexpensive thriller, set in Monte Carlo but shot entirely in south-west London. A few months later, Warner Brothers shipped him to Hollywood. In four years' time, he was squeezing into Robin Hood's tights - and sent a cheque for a fiver (plus interest) across the Atlantic.

David Lean

The future director of Lawrence of Arabia learned the proper use of a razor blade while cutting bottom-of-the-bill flicks in the 1930s. One sharp little number he edited is Dangerous Ground, a thriller from 1934 in which the killer is caught by the clever use of a concealed Dictaphone. You sense the quality from the opening scene, in which a gang of policemen swarm into a drinking den in the depths of Deptford and cheerfully beat up a suspect. (We're not supposed to disapprove.)

John Mills

In the 1930s, directors of supporting features found an enthusiastic star in little Johnny Mills, even if they did have to lay him on a sofa or put him on a flight of stairs during love scenes with actresses who were, inevitably, rather taller. He is the chirpy juvenile lead in a cheap little mystery called The Ghost Camera, but his finest B-movie hour comes in The Lash, in which he plays a permanently sloshed posh boy who spends too much time at the club, and then gets his girlfriend into one.

Margaret Rutherford

That Alpine swoop of hair, the great angler-fish jaw, the eyes narrowed in indignation: Margaret Rutherford is perhaps our greatest character star. She learned her shtick in a series of modest little pictures shot at Twickenham studios in the 1930s. Maybe the parts were a bit more various, too, than they later became. In Dusty Ermine, she plays the head of a forgery gang; in Beauty and the Barge, she gets a love scene.

Jack Hawkins

Fresh-faced and careful to insert that obligatory extra "y" between the first and second letters of the word "darling", Jack Hawkins was a well-spoken, heroic lead in dozens of modestly priced interwar movies. The most intoxicatingly odd is called A Shot in the Dark, in which he plays a man who believes he may have killed the local vicar by accidentally pushing him into a pit of slime. Fortunately, the man is saved from death by some sports equipment. "It was lucky," one of his fellow actors remarks, "that your golf clubs wedged across it."

· Matthew Sweet's documentary Truly, Madly, Cheaply: British B-Movies will be broadcast on BBC4 in June

Everett Sloane

Excellent piece, but it seems a perverse decision on somebody's part to run it three months before the programme goes out.

julian_craster

Let's hope the BBC don't screen films thay have shown recently several times before !

Namely

THE GENTLE TRAP

MASTER SPY

CLASH BY NIGHT

THE SLENDER THREAD

There are many others that could be screened....

More typical Bs are the DANZIGERS productions, the EDGAR WALLACE and SCOTLAND YARD series, and the Baker/Berman films.....I would also dispute Sweet's labelling of KONGA and the Joan Crawford shockers as Bs as they they were top of the bill on release. True Bs have much lower budgets....

stevie boy

Smokescreen with Peter Vaughan is a cracking little film

john audley

Perfection as films go I have seen it over and over without feeling bored. I will list my ten favourite Bs when I moment comes - meanwhile;
if only television would reproduce the many excellent scripts as short plays they would really please the public
(And, show again Edgar Lustgarten series - Please!!

'You should be kind to us normals, there are not many of us left you know'!

JohnWD

Were the Edgar Wallace films the ones shown during the 60's always started with the theme tune The Shadows Man of Mystery playing and a bust on a turntable.
I saw loads of them and some were pretty good

stevie boy

I have seen it twice and would love to see it again,perfection

stevie boy

they were classics of their genre, the bust was at the beginning,I am sure

john audley

This could be my most favourite thread! (Not really, that must be The Sexiest Actresses) I intend to post my ten most favoured Bs. Those were the days when one could enter the programme at any time and know some minutes before the spent time that your time to leave was coming up. Also, in those days the producers/directors (studios?) would provide a cover sketch of the plot 'so far' about every ten of 15 minutes so that if one went to the loo then the plot would be provided again Nowadays I do not know what the plot was about at the end of the film most of the time.

'You should be kind to us normals, there are not many of us left you know'!

homeguard

When you remember what the so-called 'B Movie' went with, Pathe News, advertising of goods and services, next week's main feature, then the main movie, how did we do it? My backside is numb now after half a Harry Potter film! But at least you could have a fag in peace.
Regards,
HG

donna

just said the same thing recently to my hubby, the flicks just aint the same anymore , took my grandson, cost nearly 12 quid and that was without the coke and sweeties, the place was almost empty except for some noisy messy teenagers, who spoiled the whole film for us, out of an empty cinema they got behind us kicking our seats to such an extreme that I had to scowl ,next thing an empty carton of pop corn and coke came flying past me soaking me and another young woman, it was horrendous and not an usherette in site to put them out, one film, two ads , no B film no cartoon, no fun, never again. I loved the Edgar B films too.

john audley

Great days of British cinema and the old B films. I do fear the BBC4 programme, if it follows the usual, will include many 'experts' of self importance blabbing away filling more time than the clips shown and they will probably miss the point.
I loved the old Bs, even the bad ones, with wobbly sets and rain coated Inspector plods. Where are they all? In Japan one would suppose - there were thousands made, I do have but a few and hear are ten favorites.

BLIND CORNER 1963
Starring William Sylvester and Barbara Shelley with Shelley playing a real 'Female Fatal' three timing her blind husband and looking her best too. With Elizabeth Sheppard as his Secretary and Alex Davion as Shelley's lover engaged to murder the husband so that she may take off with the husbands manager played by Mark Eden who met is demise in Coronation Street under a Blackpool tram.
The script must suggest an X rating to play with an X feature. A very neat and tight script, excellent musical score and acting.

BROKEN HORSESHOE (Butcher's, Nettlefold Studios 1956. Director Martin C. Webster)
A standard story about the drugging of racehorses with drugs acquired from a London hospital and a dodgy doctor involved with a criminal gang that includes the always lovely Elizabeth Sellers who is befriended by Robbert Beatty who becomes stupidly involved.

POSTMARK FOR DANGER (Anglo-Amalgamated 1954. Directed by Guy Green)
Again Robert Beatty, an artist, becomes stupidly involved in the murder of his model found dead in his flat.
William Sylvester is playing his brother and part of the smuggling gang.
Also stars Geoffrey Keen and and the dependable Sam Kidd in a walk on part.
The opening shot of a car going over a cliff is the same clip used in another B- film 'Assignment Redhead' that I have seen over and over without really understanding the plot!

HOUSE OF BLACKMAIL (A.C.T. Films, Nettlefold Studios - around 1952 Directed by Maurice Elvey.
A very low budget effort and some terrible acting but very amusing to watch. All shot in one large house set. Again with William Silvester playing in one of his earliest films. The car used in the film is shown with two glass panels in the windscreen and then one and then none at all!

THE HID OUT (Major Production, Shepperton Studios Directed by Peter Graham Scott)
Starring Dermot Walsh becoming involved in a dodgy fur trade deal with brother and sister Ronald Howard and Rona Anderson with the brother being murdered by Sam Kidd who swaps sides from good to bad and plays an unusually larger part for him.
One villain is played by Howard Lang who was 'Capn' Baines in the Onedin Line.

THE THIRD ALIBI
Must be a film they would have teamed with an X rated feature because the plot line would be quite racy for the year 1961 (?)
None of the three main players come through with any real dignity with the husband and the wife's step sister planning to murder the wife but the wife then murders the step sister and puts the blame on to her husband! A very clever plot line and twist finish with a delightful 'Inspector Plod' in charge of the investigation.
Stars Patricia Dainton (a good actress) Jane Griffiths as the half sister and the husband is played by Laurence Payne who was the wanted German in the film Train of Events.

BREAKING POINT
Must date to the early 1960s stars Peter Reynolds and Dermot Walsh with an excellent story line that involves Reynolds trying to swindle his uncle who owns a large bank note printing firm supplying an order to, what one must assume to be, the old Yugoslavia.

FIND THE LADY
Must date to the 1950s stars Donald Houston as a village doctor becoming involved with Beverley Brooks who is looking for her hidden grandmother in a large house being occupied by a couple of crooks digging a tunnel to the local bank.
Also appearing in the film is Mervin Johns and Anne Heywood.

PIT OF DARKNESS (Butcher's Films, Twickenham Studios, Directed by Lance Comfort)
A well known film and story that stars William Franklyn who is involved via a lost memory with his wife played by Moira Redmond. Smaller parts played by Anthony Booth, Nanette Newman and Micheal Balfour.

SMOKESCREEN (written and directed by Jim O'Connolly)
Stars Peter Vaughn playing a great part as the Insurance Inspector with Gerald Flood and Yvonne Romain and also John Carson with small comic part played by Sam Kidd. Filmed in and around Brighton an excellent film with perfect pace and logic. A great cameo appearance from Derek Guyler playing the 'jack of all trades' Station Master.

'You should be kind to us normals, there are not many of us left you know'!

CaptainWaggett

I'd be very suprised if it does. That hasn't been the format of Matthew Sweet's other works - his Shepperton Babylon documentary was excellent and no Stuart Maconie in sight!