We're continuing with British crime flicks, and last night in "13 East Street"(1952), Scotland Yard (pron.) detective "Gerald Blake" (Patrick Holt) is working undercover to catch a gang of fur thieves, but you'd never know it until about the 20 minute mark, because this is another film with a big chunk cut out, in this case 15 minutes, so when we first see Blake, he's robbing a jewelry store. Then he's sent to prison and stages a breakout on a train transfer to another slammer, with his American cellie "Joey Long" (Michael Balfour) in tow. The lackadaisical approach to security, by his guards, should be an indicator that we've seen this device before (i.e. the guards aid his escape) but because Blake's undercover assignment by the Yard chief is edited out, as is other stuff, we only ever him, early on, as a robber who gets sent to prison, then breaks out.
Then all of a sudden, he's a Yard Man undercover on a case, with absolutely no reference point in between. You just have to go, "oh yeah.....I guess so." I suspect that, while the editor knew the TV audience would eventually "get it", he (or the station owners) figured, "they'll be too tired or hammered or preoccupied to care". The writer was John Gilling, who, as we've seen, was no slouch (his "Plague of the Zombies" is one of the greatest horror films of all time). Gilling also wrote Noirs and crime flicks. But here, someone took 15 minutes of his initial 72 minute film and chucked it out the windum in the name of TV formatting.
Normally, we cheer short films, because we have learned over the years that 90% of movies are bloated, excepting the works of the great filmmakers and the movies from the Golden Era of cinema. But movies from the 70s onward? Cut em, cut em, cut em, or throw 'em out entirely. But don't cut pre-70s films that are already 75 minutes or less, and if you must cut for TV, don't cut in big chunks. Thanks, and happy editing.
Anyhow, by the time Inspector Blake infiltrates the fur gang, the boss's henchman (a big lug) dislikes him right off the bat. Its the old "he suspects the new guy is not legit" rigamarole.
Then there's the bossman's blonde babe, who likes Blake better because he's handsome and gives her the time of day. The lug is the problem. He follows Blake around, certain he's up to something, and Blake has to dodge him as he secretly meets with his Yard contact, in libraries, bars, newspaper kiosks, wherever. The lug is always trailing him, hoping to expose him to the boss as a squealer, but in fact Blake's much more; he's a cop. But the lug doesn't catch on til the end, and that's probably because he's watching the same heavily edited print as we are. Two Big Thumbs Up for "13 East Street", which has some great location shooting on the Thames. The picture is widescreen and good. ////
The previous night, in "Two Wives at One Wedding"(1961), everything is going fine for doctor "Tom" (Gordon Jackson) at his nuptials, that is, until his other wife shows up. Then it's yet another plot we've seen before, the old "I got: a) drunk, b) conked on the head c) injured in the war, and I don't remember getting married" deal. In fact, we saw a plot like this in the last year, though I can't recall the title. In such a flick, the guy always remembers the ceremony-interrupting first wife, and he can always remember a whirlwind love affair, but he never has a memory of that marriage because - right after it - one of the a,b,or c choices happened, and he got amnesia. Then he left the country, went home, and married someone else.
In this plot formula, the other wife (the amnesia wife) always shows up after the fact, this time on Tom's wedding night, after he's already hitched to "Christine" (model Christina Gregg of "Don't Talk to Strange Men" fame). Tom's amnesia wife is a French gal named "Annette" (Lisa Daniely), whom he met during the war while fighting with the French Resistance. Tom was injured in a Gestapo shootout.
The difference in this version of the plot, and it's a good one, is that we get 20 minutes of a war movie inserted, as Tom tells his France story in flashback. A priest pulled him to safety. Annette lived at his house. They had a whirlwind love affair, then came another shootout with the Nazis in which Tom got shot in the head and woke up in the hospital with no memory.
When Annette shows up in London at his wedding to Christine, she's straight up about what she wants, which is money. She's a blackmailer. "I never loved him," she tells Christine, "so you don't have to worry." "But," she says to Tom, "I want 10,000 pounds, and if you don't give it to me, I'll tell the medical board you're a bigamist. You'll lose your licence." Ahh, the old Moralistic Medical Board ploy again. We've just seen that one recently as well.
Tom visits the French embassy in London to try and get some background on the people he remembers from his pre-amnesia time in France. One is "Paul" (Andre Maranne) another French Resistance fighter who helped him cross German lines to get back to the English side. He finds Paul, who is glad to see him. "But don't lets talk about the war," Paul says. Take it from yours truly, whenever someone says, "Don't let's talk about it," it means they have something to hide.
Now, the idea that Annette would blackmail Tom doesn't make much sense. After all, he helped her Resistance group fight - and survive - the Gestapo. So now he has a hidden manipulator to uncover, someone who's using Annette as a front woman. All in all, it's a very good version of the Amnesia Wife plot formula. Two Big Thumbs Up, directed by Montgomery Tully, who's helmed a lot of these British B flicks we've seen over the past few years. Gordon Jackson, who plays Tom, was married to our gal Rona Anderson. We'll have to blackmail him to divorce her so we can get her back. The picture is very good. ////
That's all I know. No 1989 tonight (don't worry, we'll get back to it), but I am reading an interesting book: "Fly By Night: The Secret Story of Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros, and the Twilight Zone Deaths" by Steve Chain. If you want to read about the epitome of the kind of uber-egotistical and entitled Hollywood a-hole I can't stand - John Landis - this is the book for you. He's another guy who completely skated and escaped responsibility for destroying lives, because he was a studio big shot at the time. It just goes to show that, if you earn big money for the entertainment industry, you can get away with murder (at the very least voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment in Landis's case, and the a-holes he was working with). But what makes Landis even worse is his utter lack of remorse for what he caused, and what makes him scary (before his career half-collapsed), was that he was basically, per Chain's research into his personality, a sociopath operating beneath the classic Mask of Civility, which we have seen so many times (and have seen it over and over again in our own 1989 catastrophe). Sociopaths and psychotics operating under masks of civility, in Hollywood and Los Angeles in general. They're everywhere and it ain't no joke. Look at the B-word who ran down those kids while racing her boyfriend in the Malibu canyon area, or wherever it was, the cheating wife of Dr. Grossman of the Grossman Burn Center. She ran down two kids, then tried to drive away. A remorseless psycho with money and entitlement, operating under a mask of civility. I highly recommend this book, though it has extremely graphic photos of the Twilight Zone movie crash scene, so be forewarned.
My blogging music is "Forse Le Lucciole" by Locanda Delle Fate, my late night is "The Choice of Hercules" Opera by Handel. I hope your week is off to a good start and I send you Tons of Love as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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