The Painted Smile

It's only a regular B feature, but Lance Comfort had the knack for keeping even the shabbiest B plot interesting and fascinating. Of particular interest is the awkward scene of the discovery of the body, as Liz Fraser comes home with a drunken lad from her hooking club and gets that horrible phone call from 'Kleinie' who tells her to get rid of the rubbish in her bedroom. She has no idea what he is talking about and naturally gets curious, while her hooked visitor Tom follows her in and they stumble over a dead knifed body, while Tom in his besotted state grabs the knife and pulls it out, and that finishes the perfect set-up of awkwardness. All the rest is just mad chases for the truth, for the merry gentlemen at the pub where one of them got hooked by both the police and 'Kleinie's' hoodlums, and the rest will just be too obvious. One of Tom's merry companions at the club is a very young David Hemmings, while Kenneth Griffith as 'Kleinie' takes the prize in yet another of his uncanny characters of meticulous evil.

There is something engaging about these B-movies and usually one or two points of interest. In this instance that comes from seeing Liz Fraser in a leading role. It would be labouring the point to say she is required to stretch her acting muscles here, and in fact she is required more to squeeze her gargantuan bosom into tight negligees, but I always welcome the chance to see one of Britain's comedy stalwarts in a straight role. In fact the film has a few faces who went on to better things, including an almost unrecognisable Griffith as the cheif villain and a fresh-faced Hemmings before he turned into the corpulent Ken Russell-lookalike he is today. There is also a chance to see Nanette Newman doing what in an early 1960s B-movie passed for acting; she is beautiful though.

As far as being an entry in the British crime genre is concerned the film is rather disappointing. The synopsis I had led me to believe the plot concerned rival gang bosses fighting over a girl. The truth is that gangsterism is used purely as a backdrop for a series of events which befall the student. In fact, despite Fraser's top billing, the film shifts its focus away from Jo Lake and settles on Tom, as soon as he gets the corpse into his car. In that way the film resembles not so much a gangster film, or even an underworld film, as what was called in the 1980s a 'yuppie nightmare' movie, in the manner of AFTER HOURS or SOMETHING WILD.

Despite the strides towards realism which had been made in the genre this film insists on using a very dated portrayal of crimelords. Kleinie is coded as anything but a macho figure: he has a club foot, has an effeminacy about him, is clearly not from the working classes, and conducts operations (about which we learn nothing) from an oak-panelled office lined with books. Furthermore he is played by Kenneth Griffith, not an actor noted for his physical presence or menace.

Having said all that the film does have its own charm and it is remarkable to think, at a time when film production here has slumped, that Britain once had such a thriving industry and produced second features, such as this, to support the main film.

Liz Fraser seems to have been given a script meant for Diana Dors - an impression reinforced when she takes off her dress to reveal a black foundation garment. Rather too cute to be a convincing femme fatale, here she's rather improbably wed to Peter Reynolds.

Lance Comfort directs with style aided by regular cameraman Basil Emmott; while the cast includes an almost recognisably young Ray Smith and David Hemmings who display their aspirations to nonconformity by proposing a toast "To the Bomb!"

As the plot gets crazier and crazier (especially after a club-footed Kenneth Griffith shuffles in) you keep expecting Tony Wickert to wake up and discover It Was All a Dream, but the thing continues to the (very) bitter end.

Liz Fraser and Peter Reynolds have been playing the badger game. She lures a man with some money to her room, and he breaks in on them, playing the angry husband. She wants out, but is persuaded to give it one more go. She lures drunken Tony Wickert up, but Kenneth Griffith calls her, and asks how she's going to clear up the mess in the bedroom. It's Reynolds' bloody corpse. She persuaded Wickert to take the corpse, drive into the country and bury it, while she packs to leave town. Wickert, drunk, attracts the attention of the police, and abandons the car. When he sobers up, he goes to his friends for help. He and Miss Fraser have the police looking for them.... and Griffith.

There's no mystery here, but it is a pretty tight little suspense story, largely from Wickert's viewpoint. There's some nice. Owes of St. Pancras Station, and it's good to seeMiss Fraser, usually cast as a ditzy blonde, doing some acting in a minor but nicely run drama.

I rather enjoyed Kenneth Griffith's performance here as the malevolent "Kleinie". He finds himself caught up in the amateur shenanigans of "Jo" (Liz Fraser) and "Mark" (Peter Reynolds). Now this pair have an habit of using her as a lure for young men whom she invites back to her flat only for her "husband" to arrive and try a little extortion. Well, they hit on the newly flush lad - "Tom" (Tony Wickert) - but when she returns to finish the sting, "Kleinie" calls alerting her to a shocking surprise in the bedroom. The young "Tom" is too drunk to offer much resistance to her rather ill thought-out plan and before he knows it he is being sought by the police for murder. What now ensues is a fairly run-of-the-mill British crime noir as both "Tom" and "Jo" have to stay one step ahead of the pursuing police whilst their nasty nemesis has plans for them of his own. Fraser was a competent enough comedy actress, but here she hasn't really the gravitas to engender much of a sense of danger. Wickert fares slightly better as the not-so-hapless youth - once he sobers up - but there isn't much jeopardy here and as the plot shuttles along we are well aware of how things are going to turn out. It's only an hour long, though, and Lance Comfort doesn't let it hang about - it moves along well enough with a basic but adequate production and a rather hectic score from Martin Slavin to keep it watchable, if forgettable.