One Jump Ahead

Wooden performances telling in their act, a script that meanders away. Trying to remake one of those wisecracking Cary Grant movies of an earlier period, but none of the performers have any charisma at all. Jill Adams couldn't be more wooden if she was fitted with castors. The rest of the cast belong in toilet roll commercials.

Reporter Paul Carpenter is pursuing a story about a corpse found in a bombed-out church, and children scared out of their wits on the site. He's also in a tentative relationship with fellow reporter Diane Hart, but still stuck on a former lover, Jill Adams. She married a rich man, but has a habit of dropping in at his apartment when her husband is out of town.

It's a decent but uninspiring second feature directed by Charles Saunders, shot on a series of cheap sets. By the three-quarters mark, it's clear who did it, although not why. Also some of the dialogue near the end is too formal and overwritten. Still the performances are pretty good. Carpenter would play a reporter with the same name -- albeit in a supporting role -- for the some production company the following year. His career, which included 52 movie credits over 16 years, would with his death in 1964 at age 42.

Paul Carpenter the Canadian actor who died early aged 42, appears here with another actor and ex-boxer who died early Freddy Mills, in another investigative role for his screen persona of Paul Banner, see also Behind the Headlines 1956.Whereas he is a reporter on The Daily Comet in One Jump Ahead, in the former film he is running his own news agency.Other reviewers have already explained the plot so I will confine myself to other matters.

Yes it was a mystery how Freddy Mills came to die with a shotgun by his side in a turning off Oxford Street in 1965 - a bigger mystery than this film!Was it suicide or a gangland killing?The cheeky schoolboy who appears at the beginning and barely escapes with his life, I remember seeing doing commercials on t.v. in the 1950s for Rowntrees Fruit Gums.As in Behind the Headlines with Hazel Court, Paul has a faithful and helpful British girlfriend who puts up with the rigours of his job.It was an adequate length of time approx 60 plus or so and would have constituted a B film back in the 1950s.It was an interesting enough film and I enjoyed seeing some old 1950s actors in British cast films again.I rated it 6/10.

The second of three crime quickies based on novels by Robert Chapman featuring roving reporter Banner; originally played by Peter Reynolds but in this and 'Behind the Headlines' (1956) by Paul Carpenter.

Despite it's fairly light-hearted tone, three people die (including a blackmailer and an eleven year-old witness). Although set in a relatively innocent Britain in which kids could still get into cars with strange men and the tenants in blocks of flats were prepared to display signs stating that they were not in, the underside of supposedly law-abiding post-war Britain is laid bare with its matter of fact depiction of adultery & blackmail (commonly seen in British films of this period on the understanding that it was usually sternly punished). Carpenter's dalliance with married Jill Adams doesn't prevent him from having the gorgeous Diane Hart in tow as his fiancée, though.

It's obvious why this British crime drama wasn't released in America - poor cast, poorer screenplay, and a final reel that is ridiculous on all levels. Even at just an hour of running time, the feature is padded with many scenes that go nowhere.

I was surprised at the favorable reviews in IMDb, given how little happens here. The bland hero played by Paul Carpenter (an unremarkable journeyman actor) gets beaten up twice -that's about all the action that occurs. His juggling two girlfriends is boring, and the low production values resemble a PRC or Monogram picture of a decade earlier.

I've enjoyed several exploitation movies directed by Charles Saunders, including "Womaneater" and "Nudist Paradise" and he made one classic film in 1944: "Tawny Pipit" (which I saw revived at MoMA -very highly recommended), but this one displays zero effort.