Last night's crime flick, "The Switch" (1963), begins with an undercover sting, in a parking lot, on a seller of counterfeit watches. It's a low-level bust, not bad, but the London coppers have seen a lot of these Swiss fakes of late, and believe there's a major importer operating somewhere in the city. After that five minute opening scene, we "switch" gears completely, as fashion model "Carolyn Markham" (Zena Marshall) comes home to find a man in her bathtub. This is one of those "meet cute" deals (man, I hate that movie business phrase), so of course not only is she unfazed by his presence, she starts bantering with him right away. She may as well have known him for years, and after handing him a towel (with her back turned), he gets dressed, they have a drink, and he claims to be her roommate's cousin (we never see the roommate). Because he's handsome, we accept this scenario, but to say it isn't the least bit plausible is to blaspheme James Bond and all he stands for. Personally, I didn't like Sean Connery as James Bond. I thought Roger Moore was a lot better (and forget the woke Daniel Craig Bonds). I really only like the Roger Moore ones.
Anyhow, pretty soon a love affair is developing between Miss Markham and "John Curry" (Conrad Phillips), the man she found in her bathtub and wasn't fazed by. Hey! They even both drive the same kind of car, red Sunbeams, both of which get stolen from Carolyn's garage (pron. GARE-ahzzgh) on consecutive nights. The cops find 'em both abandoned with their petrol tanks missing.
When detectives ask her to retrace her steps of the past few days, the only thing Carolyn can think is that she just got back from Frawnce and left her car at the hotel while she went out to lunch with "a nice French gentleman". There's a lot of confusium about the two Sunbeams, one of which was in the shop for repairs. The other one's a rental, and when the cops figure out which is which, they get a search warrant, find one of the missing petrol tanks at the repair shop, and after can-opening it up, they find 50 fake Swiss watches packaged and taped inside.
Thinking Carolyn is in on the schmuggling ring, they interrogate her until it becomes clear she's innocent. But then she gets kidnapped by two Cypriot thugs, who blindfold her and take her to an unknown pad in the London suburbs that has hidden staircases and rotating bookcases.This is when we find out who Mr. Big is, the man behind the Swiss watch ring. Before she was kidnapped, John Curry gave Carolyn a nifty new Japanese two-way radio, which the cops hope she will use to broadcast her location. The trouble is, however, that she was blindfolded when taken there, and doesn't know where she is. Also, the two-way only has a range of four miles, so the police have to call in the national Foreign Service division to help with their direction-finding radar trucks. Their coordinated effort triangulates her, but by this time, she's in mortal peril. Also helping the search for Carolyn is a cute Cockney gal who has the caricature down to a T, at a time (1963) when Cockneymania was at a fever pitch.
"The Switch" gets Two Big Thumbs Up, though you keep waiting for the revelation that John Curry the Bathtub Man is MI5, and you suspect it even when the end credits roll, but he only ever says he's the roommate's cousin, so forget it. The picture is razor sharp, made at Pinewood Studios, well done for a B-movie. ////
The previous night, we had kind of a "Midnight Cowboy" or "Mice and Men" thing happening in "Port of Escape"(1956), where two buddies, one weak-minded, one strong, are on the run. The two are sailors, the strong one is named "Mitch Gillis" (John McCallum) and the weaker is "Dinty Missouri" (Bill Kerr). We must pause here to ask, "who thought that one up"? It sounds like a can of beef stew. Mitch and Dinty get tossed off their freighter for fighting. Dinty is a little crazy from "pressure on the brain". He loses his temper at the drop of a hat (or if someone looks at him the wrong way), and he also has no memory but believes he's from Missouri, hence his last name.
Mitch is his big, brawny-and-handsome Australian protector. He watches out for Dinty, and promises to get him back to America, and to Missouri, his hoped-for home. So there's a "goin' home" motif, and you know what that means. Again, think "Mice and Men", and substitute a mentally ill man for a retarded one. Both have Protector Men looking out for them, and Jon Voight has Ratzo Rizzo (sort of), even though that's a lousy movie.
Anyhow, after they get 86ed from their ship, the two go to a bar. Dinty loses his cool when a hooker gives him the come-hither. He starts yelling and the Teddy Boy she's with takes exception. This leads to a fight outside in the alley, where Mitch stabs the Ted in self-defense. Now he and Dinty are on the run, and the movie becomes a Stockholm Syndrome hostage drama when Mitch hides them both on a riverboat barge, own and lived in by repressed gossip columnist "Ann Sterling" (Googie Withers), who lives there with her 17-year-old sister and their older maid.
At first,the women are frightened of Mitch and Dinty, who's always just barely under control. As long as he thinks Mitch is taking him back to Missouri, hes okay, but how are they gonna get there on a 30 foot river barge? They can't sail it across the Atlantic. The police are looking for the man who killed the Teddy Boy, and they start searching every boat at the dock. At first, Mitch has to force Ann Sterling to shoo them away while he hides and holds her at gunpoint, but then - because we are doing the repressed woman Stockhom deal, (and because Mitch is big and handsome) - she falls for him and wants to sail away with him, and this pits her against her younger sister, who wants to be set free, and also against Dinty, who relies on Mitch to protect him and to take him home to Missouri.
Ann was in love once, but was hurt. She became a gossip columnist as a result, and an independent woman, but now - suddenly! - she's ready to ditch it all and allow herself to be vulnerable again, because she's smitten with the tragic and sensitive Mitch, who killed in self defense and is handsome.
The cops couldn't be less viewer-sympathetic. They all look stodgy and passionless compared to the brooding Mitch, protector of the fuse-blowing Dinty Missouri. But the William Conrad-lookin' police chief just keeps digging up clues, and.....I mean, c'mon. Would Mitch really sit down and play romantic jazz standards on Ann's shipboard piano if he were hiding out from a murder rap? I mean, wouldn't he want dead silence? Well anyhow, the piano playing gives the cops a huge clue. There's also a Cockney street crook/informer. It wouldn't be a British crime flick without one. As per usual, he's charismatic, but he double-crosses the cops and gets Mitch a 35 gallon oil drum full of petrol so he can sail Ann's barge to the shipping lanes. Both Mitch and Dinty are expert (pron. ex-PERT!) sailors. Dinty just wants to "get home" to Mizzou, to those wheat fields he remembers so well, so he can get an operation to remove the pressure on his brain. But now Ann is stealing Mitch away from him, and her sister is jealous and threatening to tell Dinty that Mitch is gonna leave him. This sets up a major league On the Waterfront climax as the cops close in. Two Big Thumbs Up, lives converge, it's all very late-50s melodrama. The picture is razor sharp, and and it turns out that John McCallum ("Mitch") and Googie Withers ("Ann") are real life husband and wife, and both are Aussies. ////
And that's all I've got for this first Sunday in April. It looks like our long rainy season may finally be over, and from what I've been able to determine, by Googling "rain totals by year, Los Angeles", 2023 was one of the five rainiest years on record since the 1880s when they began keeping track. Man, it was a wet one, and we needed it, but let's hope we get the drought back for the next few years, lol. And did you see the five planet lineup the past few nights? It was awesome. Venus was there, of course, looking like a jewel, the brightest object in the sky, due West. And Jupiter was there too, as always. You can't miss Jupiter in the southwest. Saturn is usually there, too, very small at 800 million miles away (a mindboggler), but it's usually in the vicinity of Jupiter, and then there's Mars, which can be in a number of different places, but you can always tell it by it's orange/yellow tint. You can very often see all four of these planets, but what made the past few nights special was the appearance of Mercury, which you hardly ever see, and when you do, it's very low on the horizon and just makes a pop-up appearance before it's gone. But on these nights it was fairly high up and made a "kite" form with Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Venus was the sparkling "end of the kite string" you might say. I kept stopping on my walks to look up at the amazing display.
My blogging music was "Power and the Glory" by Gentle Giant, in honor of Ray Schulman. My late night is Handel's Xerxes Opera. I wish you a very nice week ahead and I send you Tons of Love, as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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