Began directing a farcical detective thriller, "Monsieur Lecoq", in 1967 and filmed for several weeks in mostly bad weather which caused considerable delays. Eventually Columbia Pictures decided it would be cheaper to abandon the uncompleted film. John Le Mesurier, who had a small role, suggested in his autobiography that Holt never recovered from this career blow.
[on the music for "Nowhere To Go"]: It was a very early jazz score, and I think it must have been the first English one. It's my favorite score and I love it. I was given a free hand on that, thank goodness. We didn't have the usual composer in, with the lengths of film. I just sat the musicians down to play a piece and I gave them a brief that I wanted it to be cool yet dirty, and that it should have a kind of mocking quality about it. They did it beautifully. The musicians weren't bothered with where it had to go. I used it as a piece of editing and this seems to me a more satisfactory way of working than the traditional way of getting the composer to write stretches of music for specific scenes. I don't think you get the ironies right that way.
