Assignment Redhead

This movie wasn't THAT bad but it had so many plot holes, poor acting by the lead chararecters, unconvincing fight scenes and it all seems a bit unrealistic although the director manages to sustain some tension despite a very poorly written script. The story rambles for far too often - even though it's only just over an hour long.

All in all a pretty mediocre 50's B movie done with very little style and is really of only intrest to fans of low budget 1950's British Films

My rating 6/10 (Because the actors try their best with very poor material and their very limited acting abilities)

This was a truly awful British thriller.It is impossible to find a good word to say about it.The acting veers from the mediocre to the amateur.Who thought that Danny Green could handle a foreign accent?The fight scenes are so badly arranged that each blow manages to be seen to miss its target by about one foot.Some of it doesn't even make sense.There is one scene towards the end when Demetrius and his partner drive into a wood to agree on a split.We next see a policeman get off his bike.Then we go back to the pair.A gun goes off but no policeman.We don't ever see him again.Demetrius kills his partner and pushes the car with him inside over a cliff,cue an abysmal model shot.At the end there is a fire in a warehouse and it is quite obvious that the smoke is an exposure over the main picture.This is the sort of film that gives B movies a bad name!

Butcher's Film Productions made a mixed bag of films for sure but ASSIGNMENT REDHEAD has to be one of their very worst. It's a sloppily made post-war thriller with bad editing and a generally dull murder mystery storyline that never seems to go anywhere despite the intriguing storyline. In it, the authorities are hunting for a master criminal who they know was travelling on a particular plane. They have a cast of suspects to choose from, but which of them is it?

The format of the film is of a stodgy police procedural with little incident or action to recommend it, and when the action does hit it's very uninteresting. It doesn't help that few of the British cast members are up to the job of putting on a convincing European accent, and there's a romantic sub-plot that drags things down still further. Although I consider myself a fan of Butcher's Films I think this is their worst yet.

... but wasn't. If the Walmington-on-Sea Amateur Dramatic Society had been given a postal order for four pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence and invited to write, shoot and act out a film about Nazi contraband, the good burghers of Walmington would have come up with something slicker and more sophisticated than this.

Gregory Keen is a handsome American intelligence officer seconded to the British secret service in the wake of World War Two and the Berlin Blockade. His task is to thwart the nefarious plans of dastardly supercrook Dumetrius, "a man who's butchered his way half across Europe - and whom it's up to you to get!" (Yes, that really is quoted from the script.)

This awful British film of the Austerity period defines the term "amateurish". Clumsy fight scenes, un-scary bad guys like the cuddly Yotti Blum (Danny Green), a French secret agent with a crazy accent swanning around London wearing an inconspicuous beret, dreadful lines such as "You unclean cretin!" - need I go on?

The action, written and directed by someone called Maclean Rogers, is full from start to finish of absurd improbabilities. For the assassination attempt, why would the decrepit sexuagenarian Dumetrius (Ronald Adam) climb onto a rooftop with a rifle? Doesn't he have henchmen for that sort of thing? And how did he know that his 'target' would appear at this very window? In the warehouse denouement, how come the smoke doesn't move when the camera pans? It couldn't possibly be a cheaply overlaid special effect, could it? How come Rubinstein can give up half his fortune, which he protected from the rapacioua Nazis, with as much equanimity as if he were handing over a box of matches?

Coutts describes Dumetrius in one of the script's many indigestible mouthfuls as "cunning, ruthless, completely unscrupulous and will stop at nothing". One cannot help but wish that at least some of the bad guy's demonic energy had infused a few of the other people involved in this project. Nothing whatsoever in this feeble farrago comes close to being convincing. The appearance of Dumetrius, in disguise, on a routine military flight out of Berlin is plain ludicrous (wouldn't there be just the slightest risk that someone might KNOW the British officer he's trying to impersonate?), but no more ludicrous than the presence on the same flight of Hedy Bergner (Carole Matthews), the allegedly glamorous accordion player, journeying to London to play a single gig at a night club. Putting aside the universally-held view that the last time the accordion was a cool instrument was NEVER, what is she doing on a military transport? Was the accordion in so much demand in 1956? Wasn't Jimmy Shand available? And did she obtain that coiffure by letting the regimental goat chew her hair? Marzatti's is as trashy and unbelievable as one might expect - a night club depicted by someone who's never been to a night club, for an audience that has never been to one either. Why isn't Sally Jennings fazed when the strange man grabs her in the dark?

Richard Denning plays Keen, a phenomenon all too common in British films of the era - a token American, brought in to add "class". Well, compared to the rest of the movie, perhaps he succeeds. Such things are relative.

It is so amusing that in the 1940s and 1950s, redheaded actresses were the subject of boasting by film companies, even in film titles like this one, despite the fact that the films were all in black and white so that you could not possibly tell that they were redheaded at all. Rhonda Fleming and Rita Hayworth were talked about in this way long before anymore saw their hair in colour. We can only presume that Carole Mathews, who plays the redheaded mystery woman in this film, really was a redhead, as there is no way to tell. She appears still to be alive aged 92, having retired as an actress as long ago as 1978, after making 92 films (one for each year of her life so far). She was Miss Chicago in 1938 but had already appeared as an uncredited dancer in two films before that. Much better known is the square-jawed hero of this film, Richard Denning, who appeared in 113 films. Despite having some American actors, this is a British 'B' picture about postwar intrigue in London when there are still Nazis about, who are up to their usual mischief. I regret to say that the film is bland and mediocre. The Cold War is strangely absent from the plot. There are some fascinating location shots of London Airport as it was in 1956, showing the exterior of the BEA (British European Airways) passenger terminal as little more than a shed! It is always interesting to watch the location filming of London during this period, whatever silly story is going on. The director of this tepid tale is Maclean Rogers, who did three of the Paul Temple films, and indeed managed to direct 87 films before he retired in 1960, none of them notable. This film is neither good nor bad, it is just a B movie and that's all. It is watchable in an unengaging way, and that's all one can say really.