JIGSAW (1962)

JIGSAW (1962). Produced, directed, and written by Val Guest. 

A young woman (Moira Redmond) makes the mistake of telling her unseen lover that she is two months pregnant, and perhaps now would be a good time for him to break from his wife. Unfortunately, this gent has a different idea on his mind. Some time later part of the lady's corpse is found in the garage of a rented house. Detective Fellows (Jack Warner of Dear Murderer) and Detective Wilks (Ronald Lewis) are part of a team assigned to not only find out who killed the woman but who she was. Doing dogged police work (although it seems to take forever for them to bring in someone to work with an identikit) leads to mistaken identities and bum steers. Finally they discover the killer has been hiding in plain sight for quite some time. 

Jigsaw is a very absorbing British police procedural with Warner playing an amiable, highly professional detective. Lewis is also good, but he's always more interesting as a bad guy, such as in Stop Me Before I Kill! Yolande Donlan -- who was married to director Val Guest --  really makes an impression as another woman who dallies with the killer, and there's notable work from Redmond, Michael Goodliffe [The Gorgon], John Barron, John Le Mesurier [Jack the Ripper] and others. This is not another British copy of Psycho and focuses much more on the solving of the crime than it does on the crime itself. Guest also directed The Day the Earth Caught Fire. 

Verdict: Suspenseful British mystery. ***.  

TARZAN AND THE LOST SAFARI

Betta St. John and Gordon Scott

TARZAN AND THE LOST SAFARI (1957). Director: H. Bruce Humberstone.

Pilot Dick Penrod (Peter Arne of Battle Beneath the Earth), his dissatisfied wife, Diana (Betta St. John of The Robe), and friends are flying over Africa when their plane hits a flock of flamingos and down they go. They find themselves in the territory of the deadly Opar tribe, who love to make human sacrifices. Pretending to help this party -- along with Tarzan (Gordon Scott) -- is an untrustworthy fellow named Hawkins (Robert Beatty), who has an uneasy alliance with the bloodthirsty Oparians. Tarzan tries to take the downed party out of the jungle without them being attacked and killed by the hostile natives. Tarzan and the Lost Safari is in wide-screen and Eastman color -- this is the first Tarzan film in color, in fact -- but matte paintings of the jungle, some second unit location shooting, and a decent swamp set on a sound stage can't quite disguise the cheapness of the production. Tarzan is no Lord Greystoke in this, but a man of few syllables, and there's no mention of Jane. George Coulouris, Wilfred Hyde-White, and Yolande Donlan are the other members of the party. The acting is efficient enough, "Cheta" is adorable, and there's some good action at the climax, but otherwise this is not especially memorable. Humberstone also directed a number of Charlie Chan films such as Charlie Chan at the Opera.

Verdict: Mediocre Tarzan. **.