Undercover Girl

Enthusiastic photographer "Carter" (Paul Carpenter) is determined to investigate a dodgy nightclub owner whom he thinks is behind the killing of his brother-in-law. Meantime, his gal "Joan" (Kay Callard) is concerned that her naive and innocent sister "Peggy" (Jackie Collins - yep, that one!) is getting herself too closely entangled with this self same hood - "Ted" (Bruce Seton). Before long, "Carter" is knee-deep in a blackmailing and drug-running racket but can he get to the bottom of things before he, too, goes the way of the dodo? The story is actually a little more sophisticated than the routine - faking accidents to extort cash and to coerce the victims into helping with their lucrative peddling, but the dialogue is way too plentiful and there is a lot of padding - especially the scenes with the "Miss Brazil" (Maya Koumani) that rips the pace out of the film quite successfully. Seton really doesn't engender the slightest sense of malice - though maybe that's because he has been in so many of these B-features that his face is synonymous with just about every role you'd care to mention, and that does impact on the potency of his characterisations. It ends as you'd expect and is entirely forgettable stuff, sorry.

When his brother-in-law is killed, two-fisted magazine photographer Paul Carpenter goes looking for the guy who did it. His quest leads him to a hit-and-run racket, combined with blackmail, as well as a bevy of beautiful birds, including Kay Callard, Monica Grey, Jackie Collins and Maya Koumani (whose character name is "Miss Brazil").

For a cheap Butchers' second feature, it's an unpretentious, amusing little film, directed by Francis Searle. Searle was one of those British directors who directed cheap movies, mostly thrillers, and brought them in on budget, about a good as his mediocre scripts and short budgets would let him. Here's one where no one seems to have take it very seriously, and it works better for it. The result is a pleasant time-waster.

Some confusion exists over UNDERCOVER GIRL, as it was released in the US under the equally meaningless title ASSIGNMENT REDHEAD. This happened to be the name of another British crime film, made the previous year and known in the US as MILLION DOLLAR MANHUNT, thus leading to credits for the two productions getting muddled on occasions.

Here, regular 'B' lead Paul Carpenter plays a photographer taking over the investigation into a shady nightclub owner, whom, he believes, is responsible for his reporter brother-in-law's murder. He works for the kind of magazine that mixes glamour photos with articles "lifting the lid off Soho" and exposing gambling rackets - "what goes on behind the net curtains". So much for the supposedly sedate Britain of 1957. Meanwhile Carpenter's girlfriend Kay Callard is concerned about sister Jackie Collins who's also involved with the vicious club owner/gangster, played by Bruce Seton, best known at the time for his portrayal of that exemplar of 1950s law and order, Fabian of the Yard.

Carpenter uncovers a blackmail racket and drug pushing, centred on a dodgy nursing home, but, flatly presented and directed, it's not as interesting as it sounds. Obviously made on a low budget, time is padded out with Carpenter taking photos of Maya Koumani as 'Miss Brazil' while the background score of Bill Trytel further reinforces the resemblance to the kind of 1930s quota quickie of which he was a veteran. As an actress, Jackie Collins doesn't do badly, though inevitably, is more memorable for her sensational figure.

Despite the title, the sleuthing is nearly all in the hands of 'B' movie stalwart Paul Carpenter in this talky (and in places sloppily post-synced) little period piece set in cheap-looking 'luxury' apartments which matter of factly breezes through a tawdry plot involving murder and narcotics. (It was only when Maya Koumani turned up as 'Miss Brazil', sporting a tight shiny dress and a phony foreign accent that I realised that I'd actually seen this tinny little quickie on Central Television about twenty five years ago; which shows how memorable it all was.)

Sometimes interestingly lit by Jimmy Harvey, the mood music provided by Twickenham Films veteran Bill Trytel occasionally livens things up, and the women naturally all look awesome in the fifties style; although the amount of drinking & smoking shows that it's not just the snazzy threads that 'Mad Men' got right!

When Billy Peters, an investigative journalist, is shot dead in a deserted London street, it soon transpires that the reason for his killing was that his investigations were getting too close to the reasons behind another murder, that of a wealthy playboy named Mark Buxton. This sounds like a job for Scotland Yard, but Johnny Carter, a colleague of the dead man who also happens to be his brother-in-law, starts doing his own digging, and uncovers a murky business involving Soho gangsters, blackmail and drug dealing. He also discovers another personal connection to the affair in that Peggy, the actress sister of his girlfriend Joan, has become one of the gang's victims.

The above could be the plot of a typical film noir, and some British directors, notably Carol Reed and Robert Hamer, did indeed adopt the American noir style. "Undercover Girl", however, is not really made in that style. A few night-time scenes do indeed recall expressionist noir photography, but for the most part the photography and the direction are flat and uninteresting; most scenes seem to have been shot on a single camera, without any cross-cutting, doubtless because the film was made on a very limited budget.

I assumed that a low-budget B-movie like this one would have been made for the home market only, but "Undercover Girl" was in fact also released in America where it was known as "Assignment Redhead", possibly to avoid confusion with another "Undercover Girl" made a few years earlier. Neither the British title nor the American one makes much sense; there are several girls in the movie, but none of them actually go undercover. Johnny is not given an assignment to investigate Billy's death- in fact, his editor tries to warn him off, and his investigations are all carried out on his own initiative. (The only "assignment" he receives is to photograph a Brazilian beauty queen, a character presumably introduced for the sake of younger male viewers happy to watch any film which featured, however briefly, a scantily-clad glamour girl). As for "redhead", the film is made in black-and-white, so we cannot tell if any of the characters are red-headed.

Both Johnny and Joan are played by Canadian actors, Paul Carpenter and Kay Callard, and I wondered if this was done to increase the film's appeal in the American market as their accents would have sounded more familiar to American ears. Joan and Peggy are supposed to be sisters, but nobody seems to have noticed that their accents do not match. Or, if somebody did notice, they did not care enough to do anything about it. Peggy is played by Jackie Collins, who at this period was trying to follow her sister Joan into the acting profession, but if this film is anything to go by Jackie did not share her elder sibling's dramatic talents and was wise to move into the literary world.

To be fair to Jackie, nobody else in the film displays much in the way of dramatic talent either. Admittedly, B-movie crime dramas were not generally noted for Oscar-class acting, but they did occasionally feature rising stars on their way up; Joan Collins herself, for example, had made a couple in the early fifties. Nobody involved here, however, appears to have gone on to greater things. Banal direction and run-of- the-mill acting are not the film's only weaknesses; the sets are drab and boring and the plot can be difficult to follow. The running time is only 68 minutes, but somehow it seemed much longer. "Undercover Girl" still occasionally turns up on British television, but I cannot say it is still worth watching. 4/10