Landslide

In a small Welsh town, a theatre box-office cashier is murdered. When a landslide occurs, all the occupants find themselves trapped in the building with the murder among them and a potential for more victims.

A low budget murder mystery and disaster movie all in one, it says what it is on the tin, but not much more. With a better budget and director, it feels that more could have been done woth this film with potential.

This quota quickie features a story about an abysmally bad troupe of players trapped in a Welsh theater after 1) the murder of the box office lady and 2) a landslide that buries the theater. Obviously made on the cheap, but there's something very compelling (if silly) about the whole thing. It helps that Dinah Sheridan (her film debut) and Jimmy Hanley are the attractive young (and smart) leads. There's also a compulsive whirlwind type who seems to be bouncing all over the stage or playing piano. The credits list him as Ernie Westo, an actor who had a small silent career in the teens playing a comic character named Mike Murphy. Anyway, a dumb cop tries to solve the murder before those trapped die of asphyxiation or starvation, since they have to subsist on the chips (French fries) an old lady brought to the theater.

A landslide hits a small Welsh theatre and traps the actors and employees who work there. A murder is soon discovered added even more tension to the situation. This is truly a Quickie Quota picture. Donovan Pedelty wrote and directed this low budget thriller. It is very stage bound. I know the film's setting is a theatre but there is little action. The sets are not very good, especially the landslide scenes which are not convincing. The characters are a little too one dimensional. Jimmy Hanley is the true blue leading man. Dinah Sheridan is the too cheerful leading lady. Everyone else is a little too clichéd for my liking.

I know I seem to be complaining but I did enjoy the film. It is a very rare film that I have never seen listed anywhere before I purchased it. The 1930's British films have a unique charm all their own. I am quite delighted it has been made available for viewing even if it is not a great film.

"Quota quickies" - don't you just hate them? Cheap, formulaic plot, casting and and performances with sets so small and minimal that they would make a newsreader claustrophobic and not stretch his/her dramatic abilities. I give them a rating of 5 meaning that I don't care if I watch them or not. Not irritatingly bad, just neither here nor there. This film is extravagantly imaginative and boldy goes over the top and almost off the rails.

An end-of-the-pier theatrical review troupe facing a catastrophe not just life-threatening but genuinely claustrophobic too. The troupe are reminiscent of JB Priestley's in his theatrical perennial The Good Companions (1930s version) - gossipy and superficial. How would they behave facing real disaster: unified and calmly? Landslide defies comparison indeed almost defies description but is spirited and quite entertaining. Visually too, it boldly goes with the special effects and set. Two of the stars would later rise to stardom in Britain (and then the Dominions) Jimmy Handley and Dinah Sheridan.

One of a kind. A slight shadow over it being the real events of just 20 years later in the same Welsh Valleys - the landslide which enveloped a school killing nearly all children and staff.

That film preservation moves in mysterious ways shows in the pristine print of this incredibly obscure quota quickie aired in the small hours this morning on Talking Pictures. Even this is historically interesting, however, since it stars Jimmy Handley & Dinah Sheridan when they were just teenagers, five years before they married.

Donovan Pedelty's films were usually set in Ireland, but for a change this one's set in Wales (not that you'd know it from the accents of most of the cast, who are obviously as Welsh as the dance troupe they're members of, 'The Famous Orientals', are authentically Chinese).

Describing it as a mystery-thriller is already a spoiler, since for the first third of it's already short running time it seems more like a revue film (and includes a cod Victorian melodrama about a dastardly mine-owner called Jasper Johns, which I hope doesn't lead to any careless researchers claiming the nonegenarian pop artist was once a child actor).

Although people get murdered by a maniac and buried in a landslide (thirty years before Aberfan) nobody in the film seems particularly perturbed by either, and it all sounds far more dramatic that it actually is to watch. The climactic fracas when the killer is eventually almost casually unmasked is so ineptly staged it's fascinating.