Last night's movie was "Undercover Girl"(1958), another Paul Carpenter-starrer from The Butcher Brothers, in which Carpenter, an American, plays (as usual) a ladies-man reporter, doing the "receding and needing a drink" deal. He's got kind of a Darren McGavin or Dick York thing happening, and he gets upset when a fellow journalist is killed for "digging too deep" into a Soho racketeering case. In his Butcher Films, Carpenter's reporters aren't afraid to get into punchouts, or threaten mobsters. He's always meeting women aplenty in his search for the truth, and every one is attracted to him, including Miss Brazil in this flick, who in Carpenter's words "has a bust of 42 and a featherweight brain." His favorite girl is his childlike but super intelligent secretary, who dresses like a very hip bobbysoxer.
You'll need a baseball program to keep up with all the players, and after a while, the names just run at you like a fountain and you can't tell who's who, except for main characters Laura and "Peggy" (Jackie Collins before she was a writer!) But the hoodlums? There's Foster, Austin, Hunter, Farrell......too many last names without the character development to make them memorable.
The plot is that someone is running a heroin ring in which young, moneyed women are surreptitiously doped, then, while stoned out of their gizzards, they are framed up in hit-and-run schemes, where they wake up and "find out" they've plowed into an old man, who's now barely clinging to life in a convalescent hospital. Then they are blackmailed by Foster, Austin or whomever is running the show, to threaten them with payment or going to jail.
Paul Carpenter does some digging and discovers that it's the same old man over and over as the "hit and run victim", and that he wears bandages in the hospital, but underneath, he doesn't have a scratch on him. It's a scam, and all the female targets are now not only blackmailed for hit and runs they didn't commit, they're all hooked on heroin, too. But because it's the usual "give em bits and pieces" script, and then "explain it all at the end", you end up enjoying the movie more for Carpenter's "necktie adjusting" acting style. He's a Bewitched tough guy, with the all-important David Janssen hairdo. As for Miss Brazil, she just wants to attend parties, and thought London would be more exciting than it's turned out to be. Jackie Collins is actually the best actress of the parade of women. She and her sister Joan were talented before succumbing to bimboism later on (or in Jackie's case, writing mega-sellers). Bruce Seton, who plays "Austin", and whom we've seen a lot of lately in bad guy roles, plays his usual canine-faced Ruthless Bahstahd. He bears a resemblance to the Bud Lite dog Spuds Mackenzie. Two Big Thumbs Up, you can't go wrong with The Butchers and Paul Carpenter. The picture is very good. ////
The previous night, we watched a murder mystery so "high concept" (i.e. convoluted) and filled with chance meetings and introduced-out-of-nowhere characters that you'll for once be thankful for the exposition that ultimately explains things. In "Hidden Homicide"(1959), writer "Michael Cornforth" (Griffith Jones) wakes up to find he's committed a murder. But he couldn't have! We just saw him put on his po-jammies and go to bed! He even took a sleeping potion beforehand. But he must have committed the murder! We also just saw him awaken with a pistol in hand, dressed in a suit as if he'd gone out. He then finds the body in his cottage, or rather his cousin's cottage, where he's staying while he writes his book. The cousin is the dead man.
Now here comes the Chance Meeting. Just after Cornforth discovers his cousin's body, there's a knock at the door. It's two cute women, early 30ish. The night is pouring rain. The gals are soaked to the gills. "Can we please use your phone?" "Sorry, I haven't got one." "Well, then can we please use your fireplace to dry our clothing?" He can't wriggle his way outta that one, cause they can see the smoking chimbley on his roof. The women barge in. Cornforth has a dead body in his kitchen that he couldn't-have-but-must-have killed. The Chance Meeting turns into one of those "no, I'll make the tea! I insist!" scenarios, because he doesn't want the ladies entering the kitchen. That's where his cousin's body is. But, being women, they can't be kept down. "What do you take us for? Layabouts? I can make tea quite well." You also can't keep 'em out of the kitchen, so of course the tea-making gal finds Cornforth's dead cousin. Now he's forced to hold them at gunpoint so's they don't run to the Veddy Brrrittish cops. Cornforth explains himself. "I didn't kill him; I found him. Someone is trying to frame me."
Characterwise, the body-finding gal has done her job and is now out of the movie, having gone bonkers at the sight of a dead man. But the Meet Cute was designed to set up a slow-growing romance between the second gal "Jean" (Patricia Laffan) and Michael Cornforth. Suddenly, she believes his story and wants to help him, and you're gonna need help from here on out, because the screenwriter uses a technique of Obscure Now and Reveal Later, introducing characters that just walk on with no preceding context. Suddenly, There They Are! You're going, "Who's he? Who's she?" Mr. Screenwriter answers, "Don't worry, I'm just being clever. I'll tell you all about them in the last two minutes."
Cornforth calls on his old private eye buddy (and would that we all had one) because he can't figure out what's going on, either. Jean also helps him investigate for a while, but her real mission in such a flick is to ultimately fall in love with Cornforth, then get kidnapped so that he'll have an emotional reason to rescue her, and thereby enwrap them both in the movie-ending Kiss-Off. The inclusion of the Jean character is a near-Red Herring, because Cornforth spends most of his time driving around with the private eye, and of course the coppers have their own, always intercut, Dogged and Thorough Investigation.
I am glad James Kenney is in this film. We've now seen him several times, and twice recently. He's the fresh faced young actor who played the robber's naive brother in "Ambush in Leopard Street", and we've seen him in a number of such roles, as the Charming Young Man Who gets Compromised but is Slightly Smug. However, we've always suspected he had something more substantial up his dramatic sleeve, and he shows it here, in a role predating Hitchcock and DePalma by decades. This is once again a case of "I Know They Saw This Film". I can't tell you why, but it has to do with James Kenny's character, and also his portrayal. Besides that, there's another character named "Mungo Peddy." Gee, do you think Mungo Jerry saw this flick when he was 12 years old? Two Bigs! But man, don't even try to pay attention to the plot details. Just watch it and let things happen. The picture is very good, as is the location shooting in the London suburbs, where woods are always about to happen. The whole country is on the edge of the forest. ////
And that's all I know. I had a very nice birthday, with my first hike of the year, taken at Aliso Canyon where all the rainwater is still flowing through the creek bed. I also got my hair cut yesterday, a return to The Shorter Look for the first time in three years (i.e. before the pandemic). I'd love to have long hair (and I just did) but the problem nowdays is maintenance and hair quality. My hair is drier than it used to be and thus frizzes easily. If I had hair like Ty Tabor, I'd color it and let it grow super long, and I suppose I could do that if I was willing to maintain it, and have the ends trimmed on a regular basis and such, but.....well, I didn't go through with it, so my hair is shortish again. And it'll probably get long again, too. And then short.
My blogging music is an incredible-sounding bootleg of Deep Purple's May 1987 concert at the Irvine Meadows amphitheater. I was at that concert, which was also memorable because Sir Richard played much of the show with his back to the audience (he's a sensitive guy). But boy - we've been talking about his playing on Rainbow's "Stranger in Us All" from the mid-90s. Well, his axemanship at this gig is off the charts, even for RB. Check it out. Go to Youtube and put in "Deep Purple Irvine Meadows 1987". Yow! Ritchie's got a tone like a Stinging Wasp.
My late night music is Handel's Florinda Opera. I hope you had a nice weekend and I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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