Room 43 (1958)

Room 43 (AKA Passport to Shame) is a nicely sleazy 1958 British crime thriller about white slavery, with Diana Dors starring.

It starts off with a great line of dialogue. Miss Dors steps off the pavement and loses her footing and a passer-by tells her that she almost ended up in the gutter. She gives him this wonderful look, as if she knows all about ending up in the gutter. If you’re going to make a sleazy film you might as well establish the proper mood right at the start.

Nick Biaggi has a number of business interests, none of them honest. He runs a finance company that specialises in offering loans, without any security, to pretty young women. It’s a means of recruiting girls into his real business, white slavery. He recruits a lot of his girls from abroad. To get them passports he has to find husbands for them. Temporary husbands of course.

He has found a suitable husband his latest girl (an innocent French girl named Malou). Johnny McVey is a Canadian cab driver who has just borrowed a lot of money (from Nick’s finance company although Johnny doesn’t know this) to buy a new cab and now the cab has been smashed up (which Nick also arranged). Nick comes to Johnny’s rescue, getting him off the hook for the loan. Nick suggests that Johnny could also make an easy two hundred quid by marrying a pretty French girl who really needs a passport. The marriage can be annulled afterwards. There won’t be any bother and Johnny would really be helping the girl out. Johnny is a nice guy, exactly the kind of guy who would love to do something nice for a pretty girl.

Now Johnny isn’t stupid. He figures out pretty quickly what the racket is. Nick is bringing in prostitutes (or girls destined to be prostitutes) but he needs British passports for them so they can’t be deported once they start working the streets. Johnny thinks he doesn’t care because he thinks he’s cynical and hardboiled. When he meets his bride-to-be he naturally assumes she’s a tart. He’s amused when she tells him she’s a decent respectable girl.

Malou thinks she’s been hired as a companion to a nice English lady. It seems like a great job. She’s been set up in a nice house and she’s been given pretty dresses to wear. And there’s another girl living in the house, Vicki. Malou thinks Vicki is a nice girl and has no idea how Vicki earns the money that pays for the beautiful clothes she wears. Malou is very very innocent and she still has no idea what’s in store for her. She starts to get an inkling when she gets a glimpse inside Room 43, and sees what Vicki wears underneath her lovely dresses. Nice girls don’t wear underwear like that. Only women of a certain type wear such things. Then Nick explains things to Malou.

Johnny has been thinking things through as well. And he doesn’t like the conclusions that he draws. He is after all, technically, married to Malou and he’s not keen on the idea of his sweet little French wife as a streetwalker. But is it too late for Malou, and for Johnny?

This movie boasts an awesome cast. Firstly there’s Diana Dors as Vicki, at the absolute height of her sex goddess phase and looking breathtakingly beautiful. Vicki is a Whore With a Heart of Gold. Well, sort of. She’s cynically realistic but it’s a life that ruined her sister so she’s not exactly happy being a whore. Like Johnny, she’s not as hardboiled as she thinks she is. Odile Versois as Malou is technically the female lead in the picture but Diana Dors was a much bigger name and a much bigger box-office draw, and while Mlle Versois is good it has to be said that Diana Dors effortlessly dominates the movie even in what is technically a supporting rôle (albeit a very meaty and substantial supporting rôle). Dors as always lights up the screen, and in practical terms she is indeed the star.

Then there’s Herbert Lom, deliciously oily as Nick. It’s the sort of rôle he always had fun with and he has even more fun with Nick’s pretensions to being an English gentleman.

And finally there’s Eddie Constantine, best remembered from the wonderful French Lemmy Caution thrillers such as Dames Don’t Care. He’s a perfect slightly reluctant hero, a guy who doesn’t really want to do the right thing or get mixed up in other people’s problems but he just can’t bring himself to behave like a louse. It’s a fine performance with plenty of rough-around-the-edges charm.

Look out for Joan Sims (of Carry On fame) in a small part.

For those who like spotting classic cars in movies Nick drives a very cool Aston Martin DB Mark III (which is incidentally the car James Bond drives in the original 1959 novel version of Goldfinger).

There’s some nice hardboiled dialogue. Vicki tells Malou she’s in the entertainment business. Malou, all excited, asks her what she does. Vicki replies, “Entertain.”

There’s an amusing drug/dream sequence, a fascinating piece of psychedelia before anyone knew what psychedelia was.

This is a hard-to-find movie. The only copy I could get hold of is a slightly dubious grey market version which offers a fairly poor transfer which appears too be pan-and-scan. But it’s a Diana Dors movie so I had to have it. And if you’re a Diana Dors fan you’ll want it as well.

Room 43 is an overheated sex and sin melodrama but it has style, it has fine performances and it works for what it is. It’s sleazy and it’s romantic and it’s thoroughly enjoyable in a slightly disreputable way, and it has an exciting finale as well. Highly recommended.

The Long Haul (1957)

The Long Haul is an excellent and unjustly neglected British film noir from 1957. It’s a gritty and very dark movie concerning corruption and crime in the trucking industry. Victor Mature and Diana Dors are the stars. It was made by a small independent producing company and distributed by Columbia Pictures.

Harry Miller (Victor Mature) drives trucks for the US Army in Germany. When he is discharged he plans to return to the States but his English wife Connie persuades him that they should spend a few months in England first. Her family lives in Liverpool and her uncle can get him a job in his long distance trucking business.

Harry soon discovers that this industry is rife with crooked practices and gangsterism. Harry is an honest man and wants nothing to do with it but when his truck is hijacked he finds that no insurance company will touch him and that as a result he cannot get work. Then his friend Casey offers him a job. He tells Harry it’s slightly illegal. In fact it’s highly illegal and it all goes horribly wrong.

The prime mover behind most of the crime in the industry is trucking boss Joe Easy (Patrick Allen). Harry has already had a run-in with Easy and he is about to become involved with Easy in an unexpected and potentially very messy way. Harry has already encountered Joe’s beautiful young girlfriend Lynn (Diana Dors). When Lynn and Joe have a major fight Lynn takes flight in Harry’s truck. Harry has no intention of doing anything other than drive Lynn somewhere where she will be safe but one thing leads to another and they spend the night together.

Apart from causing Harry a lot of grief with both Connie and Joe Easy this also makes things difficult for Lynn’s brother Frank (Peter Reynolds) who works for Joe.

Harry is now sliding into the noir nightmare world. His one night stand with Lynn was bad enough but now she’s fallen in love with him. And he is being drawn deeper into crime. He simply cannot get honest work and then he discovers something that shakes him so much that he longer cares what happens to him. Harry is however basically a nice guy and he has a kid about whom he cares deeply. He also has to admit that he’s in love with Lynn. He thinks he’s given up but he’s not the kind of guy who really gives up.

This is classic film noir with a decent guy who becomes entangled in dirty dealings against his will, and his downfall is brought about by a femme fatale in the person of Lynn. Lynn is not an evil spider woman, in fact she’s basically decent as well, but fate has cast her in the role of the femme fatale.

Victor Mature gave his best performances in film noir and he’s superb here. He is tough but sensitive, he doesn’t go over-the-top but his anguish is obvious as his life slips out of control. Diana Dors gives yet another fine performance confirming her position as the queen of British noir. Lynn has had a tough life and she is both hardboiled and vulnerable. She doesn’t want to wreck Harry’s life but she can’t give him up - he’s the first decent man she’s met. Mature and Dors generate convincing chemistry. Patrick Allen makes a very nasty villain. The supporting cast is very solid.

Writer-director Ken Hughes displays an instinctive feel for the world of film noir. The plot is nothing startlingly original but that could be said of most film noir. It’s the way the material is handled that makes for great film noir and Hughes handles the material with considerable skill. Basil Emmott’s black-and-white cinematography is another major asset.

Columbia’s region-free DVD presents this movie in an excellent anamorphic widescreen transfer.

This would make a great double feature with Hell Drivers, another fine British trucking noir made in the same year.

The Long Haul is highly recommended as a fine example of British film noir. The superb performances by Mature and Dors make it a must-see movie.

Yield to the Night (1956)

The 1956 British production Yield to the Night was the most highly regarded of the movies of Diana Dors and is usually considered to be the movie on which her reputation as a serious actress rests. Personally I don’t entirely agree. I have a very high opinion of Diana Dors as an actress but I think she did better movies and gave better performances (such as her performance in Unholy Wife).

It’s not that she isn’t superb in Yield to the Night (and actresses have won Oscars for performances much inferior to this one) but I think she’s done more subtle and more original work than this.

As for the movie itself, your feelings about it will depend almost entirely on your response to the movie’s politics. For this is a very very political movie. Mary Hilton (Diana Dors) is a married woman, but not exactly what you’d call a happily married woman. When she meets good-looking piano player Jim Lancaster (Michael Craig) she needs no persuasion at all to drift into an affair.

The problem is that for Jim this is just a distraction, some recreational sex to keep his mind off his other problems. And he has lots of problems. His biggest problem is Lucy Carpenter. He’s crazy about her but she’s really out of his league. His other problems are a major propensity towards self-pity and self-dramatisation. Unfortunately Mary is hopelessly in love with him. And she can’t quite accept the evidence that he’s not that interested in her for anything other than casual sex.

Mary is not exactly stupid, but she’s a hopeless romantic and she’s convinced herself that Jim is the one man for her. Of course this situation is bound to end badly, and it does. It ends very badly indeed. And rather than just get upset in the short term, Mary broods. She starts thinking about revenge. And she starts thinking about Jim’s gun, the one she took away from him when he was going through one of his major self-pity stages. Mary starts to think that Lucy shouldn’t be allowed to get away with doing what she did. Mary starts to think that Lucy deserves to die. And she has Jim’s gun. And pretty soon Mary finds herself a murderess.

Most of the movie concentrates on her experiences in prison, on the British equivalent of Death Row. The most interesting thing about the movie is the focus on her relationship with the various female prison warders, and in particular with MacFarlane (Yvonne Mitchell). Despite her tendency to shoot people Mary is a likeable rather vulnerable young woman and the warders grow quite fond of her. They get to know her very well, and they like her. Diana Dors wisely doesn’t resort to scenery-chewing. She downplays her performance, and that makes it all the more affecting.

The support cast is very strong, with Geoffrey Keen as the chaplain contributing a sensitive performance. And as mentioned earlier Yvonne Mitchell is extremely good.

The problem with this movie is the problem with all social problem movies. It’s essentially propaganda. Like all such movies it’s deliberately and shamelessly manipulative, willing to go to any lengths to advance its political agenda. And in this case it does so in a breath-takingly dishonest manner. The actual murder victim is dehumanised, depersonalised and marginalised to the point where she scarcely even exists, except in so far as she’s demonised to make us see her as the real villain.

To accept this movie you have to accept wholeheartedly a particular political view of crime, that the so-called victims of crime (such as the wicked Lucy) are the real villains while the criminals (like poor sweet Mary) are the victims and the ones deserving of our sympathy. Not only is Mary much nicer than Lucy, she’s also younger and prettier. And she’s a real person, a person we get to know very well, while Lucy is just a faceless evil woman. I can’t recall ever seeing a movie that uses such techniques quite so blatantly.

None of which detracts from the skill of director J. Lee Thompson or the magnificent performance of Diana Dors, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit of a nasty taste in my mouth after seeing this movie. An extremely well-made and very emotionally powerful movie, but if you don’t buy its political agenda you may well feel uncomfortably that you’ve been used.

Tread Softly Stranger (1958)

Tread Softly Stranger is a 1958 British crime thriller that seems to enjoy a fairly poor reputation. I have no idea why. It’s enormously entertaining. Yes, it is overheated and melodramatic verging on hysteria, but if like me you consider those qualities to be assets rather than liabilities you’ll enjoy this movie. Plus it has some very film noir qualities, and it has Diana Dors.

George Baker is Johnny Mansell, a gambler and man-about-town. Unfortunately he’s been on a major losing streak and he owes rather a lot of money and the people he owes it to are the sorts of people who tend to get rough when they’re owed money. Johnny decides it’s time to get out of London for a while.

He heads back to his home town, a grimy northern industrial city. It’s a depressing place but Johnny knows his way around there and he also has a brother there. Dave Mansell is not like his brother. He’s a hardworking sober sort of guy. Johnny has heard of work but doesn’t think he’d like it and he’s never been desperate enough to try it.

Dave has his own problems though. Well one problem really, his girlfriend Calico (Diana Dors). It’s not that Calico isn’t fun to be around. She’s lots of fun. And she’s gorgeous. But Calico likes pretty things. Pretty things that tend to expensive. Jewellery. Nice dresses. And she likes going out to clubs and restaurants. Keeping Calico in the style to which she’s accustomed isn’t easy when you earn 12 pounds a week as a book-keeper for a large steelworks.

Dave has found a solution to this difficulty. He’s been helping himself to the firm’s money. That’s a solution that turns out to be not quite such a clever idea when he discovers the auditors will be checking the books in a week’s time. And the books are not exactly in the sort of state you might wish them to be when the auditors call. Johnny likes his brother and offers to help him out. Johnny has a surefire answer to this ticklish problem. There’s a horse running on the weekend and it simply can’t lose.

Calico and Dave have come up with an alternative solution which is for Dave to rob the factory and steal the payroll. Johnny will need to come through with the money from the horse race in time to stop Dave from putting his hare-brained scheme into practice. The two brothers face another awkward problem. Calico and Johnny have fallen in love. Dave is a nice guy and all that but he’s a little on the dull side for a girl like Calico. Good-looking raffish gamblers are more her speed.

The plot is certainly very clichéd but film noir doesn’t require highly original or even plausible plotting. If a film noir has enough style that can be more than enough. And Tread Softly Stranger has plenty of style. It was photographed by Douglas Slocombe, a superb cinematographer. Everything in this movie is grimy, bleak and harsh. There’s not a ray of sunshine to be seen. Everything is old and rundown. It’s a perfect noir cityscape.

The acting is equally entertaining. I’ve always admired George Baker and he’s a fine noir hero, a likeable loser who drifts aimlessly through life enjoying himself but is not quite as clever as he thinks he is. Terence Morgan is extremely good as Dave, a man who is very different from Johnny but in his own way just as weak and just as likely to find himself shipwrecked by life.

And then there’s Diana Dors, surely one of the most underrated actresses in British film history. She’s a magnificent femme fatale. Calico isn’t evil. She’s actually not a bad person at all. But like Johnny she’s addicted to a lifestyle that is glamorous and expensive and she is determined to have that lifestyle no matter what the consequences. She destroys men no out of malice but because she can’t help herself. All three central characters are good-natured but fatally weak-willed. Dors gives a superb performance and she absolutely sizzles with sex. Calico gets the movie’s best lines. “I come from the slum, where it’s quite a step up, even to the pavement.” And “I discovered that my legs weren’t made just to stand on.”

Perhaps not a classic in a conventional sense but a thoroughly enjoyable movie with a nice mix of darkness with a dash of camp. The all-region DVD from Odeon’s Best of British range is highly recommended. A lovely transfer that does full justice to Slocombe’s cinematography.

Man Bait (1952)

Mention Hammer Films and most people think immediately of horror movies but in fact horror came fairly late in the company’s history. Formed in 1932 Hammer really started to hit their stride in the early 50s with a series of film noir B-movies, such as Man Bait (also released with the less lurid title The Last Page)

Many of Hammer’s best efforts in the film noir mould (including this one) were directed by Terence Fisher, later to become much better known as director of some of the studio’s most successful horror films. Fisher had already made several films including the superb mystery thriller So Long at the Fair.

Hammer imported American stars for most of these movies. They were either stars of the second rank, or stars who had fallen on slightly hard times and were prepared to work for modest fees, but in fact Hammer showed rather good judgment in choosing these imports from cross the Atlantic and got some impressive performances out of them (Lizabeth Scott being particularly memorable in the superb Terence Fisher-directed Stolen Face). In the case of Man Bait the imported star was George Brent.

Brent is John Harman, the manager of a large bookshop in London. He has just cashed in an insurance policy, the money being intended to finance traveling expenses and treatment for his invalid wife. His employees include a very flighty but very attractive young lady named Ruby (Diana Dors). Working late one night they find themselves kissing. Harman is embarrassed, apologises, and assumes the matter has been forgotten. But Ruby has met a very plausible but very shady character named Jeffrey Hart. He’s just out of prison and broke but now sees his opportunity, Ruby can blackmail her boss, and they can share the proceeds. It seems like a simple plan, but things go terribly wrong.

On thing you always expect of a Terence Fisher movie is that it will be tightly paced with not a single wasted shot, and this movie is no exception. You also expect the direction to be exceptionally professional and extremely effective, and that’s certainly the case here. Fisher might not qualify as a great film artist or an auteur but he was a master craftsman.

Brent is quite good. Peter Reynolds is wonderfully slimy as Jeffrey Hart. The cast as a whole performs admirably.

And then there’s Diana Dors. Despite the credits which say “introducing Diana Dors” the 20-year-old was already a veteran with more than a dozen movies to her credit. She was eventually to find her blonde bombshell image a major problem and always had difficulties getting taken seriously enough to land worthwhile roles. Whenever she did get a decent role she invariably turned in a very fine performance. Ruby is an interesting character. She’s set up as a femme fatale but we’re left wondering whether to regard her as villainess or victim. Diana Dors makes her a interesting mix of vulnerability and over-confidence combined with a sexuality that is not quite under her control. It’s a great performance by
a talented and underrated actress.

It certainly has some features that mark it as film noir but whether it’s true film noir or not it’s a well-made and highly entertaining crime thriller and I recommend it unreservedly.

The VCI DVD release pairs it with another Hammer film noir, the delightfully titled Bad Blonde which I haven’t yet had a chance to watch. There are one or two moments when the sound becomes just a tiny bit a bit crackly but in general the sound quality is more than acceptable and the picture quality is excellent. It’s also quite inexpensive and very good value for money so there’s no reason whatsoever not to grab this one.

The Unholy Wife (1957)

While she’s often been described as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe Diana Dors was in fact an established star when Monroe was still a complete unknown. And to an even greater degree than Monroe, and even more unjustly, Diana Dors was fated to have her abilities as a serious actress overshadowed by her blonde bombshell image and her eventful private life. In 1956 she signed with RKO and set off for Hollywood, The Unholy Wife being one of the results.

The plot of this movie is promisingly lurid. It unfolds in true film noir style with the entire story being told in flashbacks and with voice-over narration by Dors’ character, Phyllis Hochen. The backstory is filled in by a flashback-within-a-flashback. Phyllis was a good time girl and when Paul Hochen and his buddy Gino walk into a bar in LA she and her girlfriend recognise them immediately as good prospects. They’re obviously wealthy, middle-aged, from out of town, and from the country. The girls are only too willing to be picked up. Phyllis and Paul spend a romantic weekend together but for Paul it’s more than just a passing dalliance. He’s head over heels in love, and much to her surprise he proposes marriage.

A year later they’re living in a rural valley north of an Francisco where Paul owns a vineyard, but the marriage is not going so well. Phyllis is bored by rural life, and she’s bored with Paul. She’s even more bored by his family and his friends. She’s young, she wants to have a good time. And she is having a good time, with her lover San.

Then a fatal temptation is placed in her path. Paul’s elderly mother is convinced she has heard a prowler. Phyllis takes Paul’s revolver and fires off a few rounds into the darkness, mostly to relieve the boredom and to upset the old lady. And an idea occurs to her. Nobody would be suspicious if a young woman alone in a house with only an elderly woman got frightened when she heard a prowler and fired at a man coming through the front door. If that man happened to be her husband, why then of course it would be written off as a tragic accident, and there would be much sympathy for the attractive young widow.

Unfortunately the man who comes through the door isn’t Paul, but Phyllis is nothing if not resourceful. She quickly works out a way to make Paul take the blame.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with the plot. Great crime movies have ben made from flimsier plots than this. It’s the execution that is the problem. Australian-born director John Farrow must bear much of the responsibility. His direction is turgid and lifeless. Farrow had directed The Big Clock a decade earlier and it’s a delightful tongue-in-cheek romp of a movie. Perhaps the problem is that Farrow had become a convert to Catholicism, and this is a very, very Catholic movie. Paul has a brother who is a Catholic priest and his sole function in the plot is to act as God’s instrument and to bring the wicked to judgment and to salvation. When it comes to the ending Farrow seems unsure if we’ve got the point so he beats us over the head with it repeatedly.

Another huge problem is the acting. Rod Steiger is truly awful as Paul. Arthur Franz as his priest brother is even worse. Tom Tryon is deadly dull as Phyllis’s lover San. Perhaps audiences in the 50s would have seen it differently but a modern audience will undoubtedly see the virtuous characters in this movie as, without exception, mealy-mouthed, annoying, smarmy, self-righteous prigs.

With all those flaws you might think this movie is not worth seeing. Actually you’d be wrong, because it does have one huge asset. It has Diana Dors. She’s fabulous. She plays up the whole bad girl thing but there’s more to her character than that. Not only is she the only member of the cast who can act, hers is the only character with any light and shade to it. She tells Paul before she marries him exactly what kind of woman she is. He can’t say he wasn’t warned. Phyllis has a son by a previous relationship (it’s implied but not stated that she wasn’t married to the child’s father). And she tells Paul she’s a bad mother.

The problem with the message the movie is trying to push is that it makes virtue seem pretty dull while Diana Dors makes sin seem pretty exciting. If she represents wickedness and depravity then I’ll choose wickedness and depravity.

The print screened by TCM in Australia was truly atrocious - dark and muddy with washed-out colours and a very soft picture. Which makes it hard to recommend this movie, but Diana Dors makes it worthwhile.

Interesting trivia: While Rod Steiger and Diana Dors don’t generate much sexual chemistry on-screen apparently it was a different story off-screen, which resulted in something of a scandal (they were both married to other people at the time).