British B-Movies at the BFI, Part # 1

This December, the British Film Institute has seen fit to run a short season of vintage British b-pictures, pulling some choice items from the NFT archives, most of them rarely screened since their initial theatrical release, backing up the big Hollywood items of the day at the bottom of double or even triple bills. Given how familiar we’ve become with the history and conventions of American b-movies, from the heyday of westerns, RKO gangster flicks and poverty row quickies through to the slide into exploitation and horror, I was interested in getting a feel for their unheralded and largely forgotten British equivalents, and managed to make it along to two of the four double bills that the BFI is running.

In an era when information and a critical consensus on even the most obscure movie can be googled up in a few seconds, it was strangely exciting going to the cinema with no idea at all what to expect. Nobody except maybe archivists and British cinema historians have watched some of these films in decades – could they be lost classics, or just total junk? Well, for the most part they’re neither as it turns out, but they are at least entertaining, competently constructed timewasters and great examples of unpretentious popular cinema, not to mention effective “windows into a lost world”, as organisations like the BFI always like to claim, not unreasonably, when screening low budget films of questionable artistic merit.

Oddly, by far the best film I saw was also the earliest one, Penny and the Pownall Case, a rip-roaring comedy-adventure flick directed by the excellently named Harry ‘Slim’ Hand in 1948. Running to barely 45 minutes, the film was inspired by the popular ‘Jane’ newspaper strip – a daily item which, in typically reserved British fashion, traded on the adventures of a pretty lady who was constantly threatening to take her clothes off but never actually did. As such, Peggy Evans here stars as Penny, a ditzy, detective novel obsessed blonde (hey, this was 1948) who models daily for her own comic strip, as drawn by – wait for it – Christopher Lee, in one of his first screen roles! Sir Christopher’s performance here is camp as canvas, with a naive stage school sparkle in his eye that rather undermines his subsequent decades of moody “I’m a serious actOR” posturing, and it’s at least faintly unbelievable when it transpires that his character is also the ruthless kingpin of a criminal gang smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Europe! It also turns out that Penny’s roommate (Diana Dors!) works as secretary to a Scotland Yard bigwig on the trail of said Nazi-smugglers, and as such Penny is recruited by the Yard to help put an end to Lee’s dastardly schemes. The result is a non-stop cavalcade of thrills, spills and comedic antics, taking in desperate tranchcoat-clad villains, a trip to “Spain” (I think they just borrowed some sets from an opera company and hired some swarthy-looking guys as extras), dinner invitations from dashing detectives, and a speeded up chase through the home counties in Austin 10s (“step on it Jones, he’s getting away”). Remember the good old days when an airport was a scout hut with a few yards of runway…? Obviously I don’t, but this film still brings it all back.

One of the things I found most interesting about ‘Penny..’ is that, whilst it is obviously very, very restrained, some of the scenes and set ups seem to prefigure the kind of thing you’d be more likely to see years later in an American sexploitation flick – two pretty girls wrestling in their pyjamas? Penny running around town with a raincoat over her bathing costume? Plenty of ‘changing behind the curtain’ footage? Not much to go on, sure, but it must have raised a few eyebrows in 1948, when most British films still steadfastly refused to offer anything more visually stimulating than a bunch of Edwardian gents sitting around in a drawing room waiting to die. Also worth a mention are the endless succession of ludicrous outfits Peggy Evans is forced to wear – it’s hard to tell whether they’re an honest attempt at contemporary high fashion or a deliberate parody of such, but either way, her every appearance in a new scene was greeted with a roar of laughter from the crowd at the NFT, and understandably so – between the heart-shaped bonnet with matching waist-level patches and the twelve inch Robin Hood hat feather, I think the costume designer for this movie deserves credit as a visionary maniac of some kind.

In addition to this, we get some tough crime action (“what’s the news?”, “not good sir – he’s been shot through the heart, with a Luger I think”, “oh dear”), innuendo so vague it’s positively surreal (“I get the oddest letters from France”, “I’ll bet you do”), and everybody’s home in time for tea. As the title and short running time suggest, ‘Penny and the Pownall Case’ was planned as the first instalment in a series of adventures, and it’s a shame the rest seemingly never came about, because this one’s still a hoot, sixty years after the fact.

Somewhat less enjoyable was The Third Alibi, directed by b-movie stalwart Montgomery Tully in 1961. Quaint as the idea may seem today, Jack Clayton’s ‘Room At The Top’ sparked a veritable revolution in British cinema in 1959 with its frank depictions of extra-marital relationships and class conflict, and ‘The Third Alibi’ follows Clayton’s lead, in regard to the former aspect at least, with a cynical, melodramatic tale of a brooding songwriter carrying on an affair with his wife’s recently divorced sister, a situation that leads to a bungled murder plot when the sister announces her pregnancy and songwriter guy’s wife cruelly refuses his request for a divorce. As essentially a murder mystery with no mystery, it’s hard to know how to really categorise this one – given the Postman/Indemnity style storyline you could call it a noir, if only it had a decent script or any sense of visual style. As it is, it’s a fairly grim, workmanlike affair, conveying a queasy sense of suburban hopelessness, and is chiefly notable for the visual evidence it provides of an England that the bigger budget films of the period were careful to keep from the screen – a world of ugly interior décor, pebbledashed bungalows and cheap modernist furniture that was new when this film was made, and that I remember fading into the past during my own childhood. Also of interest is an excellent musical interlude featuring Cleo Laine – accompanied on the piano by Dudley Moore according to the BFI site, although I didn’t notice him. That aside, following the logic of the plot would waste an hour nicely enough on afternoon TV, and you’ll get a cruel chuckle out of the ‘poetic justice’ conclusion, but ‘The Third Alibi’ is a pretty empty experience on the whole.