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| Alex Nicol |
"Happy days! Everyone was poor and no one was evil."
James Bradley (Alex Nicol of Heatwave) is a famous American trumpeter appearing in London. One night he meets a charming young lady named Maxine (Ann Hanslip) who invites him to her apartment for dinner. The next day he learns that the woman has been murdered, and he determines to find out who killed this stranger who struck such a chord in him. The suspects are many: the victim's sister,. Barbara (Eleanor Summerfield), who lost her man to Maxine; Maxine's fiancee, Johnny Sutherland (Paul Carpenter of The Unholy Four); the famous pianist Jeff Colt (Arthur Lane); and his wife Gloria (Paula Byrne). Frankly, the whole business with "Brad" playing detective is ridiculous, even if the inspector on the case implies that he was letting him have a free hand for his own purposes. We even have the bit where this amateur sleuth gathers all the suspects together to make an accusation. The acting is uniformly good, although Nicol is given a rather impossible and somewhat unsympathetic character to play. This Hammer production is like a TV show.
Verdict: Good cast but unmemorable in all other respects. **.
2 comments:
You made me look up Alex Nicol and Terence Fisher here, they seemed vaguely familiar to me. Nicol was a member of Actor's Studio and worked with all the greats on Broadway, but a lot of B-movies on screen, and Fisher directed all those wonderful Hammer horror films. Black Glove seems like it would be a change of pace for both of them.
-C
That it was. As you say, Fisher made his mark with the Hammer horrors, and Nicol was another one of those good-looking, competent actors who never quite got his due. Fisher worked with a number of American leading men in his film noir movies for Hammer.
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