Interpol

1957's Pickup Alley, or Interpol, directed by John Gilling, looks like a travelogue but evidently a lot of it was filmed in Naples. However, cinematographer Ted Moore did such a beautiful job - the locations are really the star.

The film begins with a woman calling "Charles" with urgent information; someone then enters and kills her.

She turns out to be the sister of an American narcotics agent Charles Sturgis (Victor Mature). The killer is international drug smuggler Frank McNally (Trevor Howard), and Sturgis is determined to bring him to justice.

With the aid of Interpol, he is able to track McNally and his girlfriend Gina (Anita Ekberg) to Europe.

Clearly a B movie using British and American actors, Pickup Alley is on the dull side without much in the way of characterization, except showing McNally's violence toward women. The old buildings, the streets, the docks, plus a chase on a roof make it interesting.

Ekberg is beautiful as McNally's drug mule but has been shown to much better advantage. She met Tyrone Power when she was an extra in Mississippi Gambler and embarked on a several year affair with him, even meeting his family in Cincinnati.

To avoid a lawsuit, wife Linda Christian's did not name her in her book, but she is clearly the woman for whom he wanted a divorce. He and Christian eventually reconciled. He liked blonds with accents.

This was an interesting film which starred Victor Mature, (Charles Sturgis) who was a US Narcotics Agent working with Interpol in order to catch a large dope smuggling operation. Gina Broger, (Anita Ekberg) played a young gal who was working with a big shot dope king, Frank McNally, (Trevor Howard) and was only working with him because he kept her against her will and would not let her go. There is plenty of travel into Lisbon, Greece and New York and it seemed at times that Charles Sturgis was running around in circles. Trevor Howard gave a great supporting role along with Anita Ekberg, but this film was definitely a low budget film and because this was a 1957 film, the gals all wore skirts down to their ankles.

Found in Noir Archive vol 3, this is a watchable English noir that has some perfunctory acting from Mature and Ekberg, along with enjoyable scene chewing from Howard--what a long way from The Third Man and Brief Encounter!--and a terrific cameo from Bonar Colleano, whom I don't recall seeing before.

You won't care about the plot--something to do with international heroin smuggling, a murky subject dealt with carelessly by John Gilling. The interest lies in the locales, which are beautifully shot by Ted Moore, who besides making a half dozen Bond films also won an Oscar for A Man For All Seasons. The catacombs scene might have come from an Orson Welles film, Othello say, it's that evocative.

Victor Mature stars in Pickup Alley as a drug enforcement officer who has his professional and personal life combined in this film. His sister Dorothy Alison is strangled by Trevor Howard who is a big drug syndicate kingpin that everyone knows about, but who has successfully kept a very low profile. All kinds of police agencies are looking for Howard and now Mature has a personal reason to get him.

Thinking she killed Howard's partner his moll Anita Ekberg is also on the run. She might be the one to lead Mature to Howard so he tails her across several international cities back to New York where the climax takes place.

This idea had already been tried and far more successfully in the Dick Powell noir classic To The Ends Of The Earth where Powell was the drug enforcement agent with no personal axe to grind who follows a drug shipment. We get to see several glimpses of major cities in Europe and of course New York. Nothing that really registers a decent impression.

Pickup Alley was an OK second feature, but will never be a classic. Fans of Mature, Ekberg, and Howard will be satisfied. Best in the film in a small role is Bonar Colleano, exiled American gangster who lives by his wits both as souvenir salesman in Rome and peddler of information to those with a price.

A law-and-order thriller focusing on the international narcotics trade, Interpol (aka Pickup Alley) harks back to such dire warnings as Port of New York and To The Ends of the Earth. It looks forward, too. Courtesy of co-producer Albert (Cubby) Broccoli, who five years hence would issue the first film in the deathless 007 franchise, Dr. No, this British-made movie serves as a brief, black-and-white preview of the trans-global intrigues James Bond would soon be set to smashing.

The surly secret agent here is drug-enforcement officer Victor Mature, and his motives are not merely professional: Not only is his `kid sister' hopelessly hooked to the needle, but in the pre-credits opening scene, a female colleague ends up strangled with her own scarf by heroin kingpin Trevor Howard, an arch and urbane adversary who flourishes a cigarette holder, like Charles Grey's Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. In pursuit, Mature jets from New York to London and thence to Lisbon, Rome, Athens, Naples and back to the States.

There's even an exotic Bondgirl (Anita Ekberg), shanghaied into working against her former boss, and an amusing local helpmate (Bonar Colleano) as an expatriate Yank peddling junk and souvenirs to tourists in the Eternal City. He first pops up before an excursion into the Catacombs, where death proves to be not always ancient. Similar set-pieces – chases across rooftops and up and down steep streets – enliven other ports of call.

But, like many of the Bond movies, Interpol comes at you in sections. We cool down from one diversion in anticipation of the next. But there's not much thought given to a determining plot-line or sustaining mood. And the major characters aren't given much in the way of, well, character; to make matters worse, they're barely allowed to interact. Most of what Interpol has to offer was already done earlier in the noir cycle (occasionally by Mature and even Howard), or would be done better in the splashier spectacles of the 1960s. And let's face it: Apart from her frolic in the fountain in La Dolce Vita, Ekberg would never amount to much of a fixture in film history.