Mix Me a Person

Harry (adam faith) is being brought up on murder charges in london. But he didn't do it! His lawyer's wife anne, played by anne baxter, decides to see what she can find out, so she pokes her nose in and gets his side of the story. Harry is going to hang for sure, unless anne can convince harry's friends to help her find proof of his innocence. Baxter plays every single scene with such drama. As does the husband. Faith sings a very slow, vanilla version of la bamba, about halfway through. It's okay... it kind of goes off the rails at the end. Baxter had won her oscar back in 1947 for razor's edge. And should have won another for eve! Directed by leslie norman. Based on the novel by jack story... who also wrote hitchcock's the trouble with harry! Another harry.

Adam Faith is a teenage tearaway accused of killing a policeman, but he never done it, honest. Anne Baxter is his lawyer's shrink girlfriend (or so we think), determined to find out the truth. Plot twists will keep you glued. But listen carefully, as Faith talks in a rapid Cockney mumble, and both Baxter and Sinden have this annoying habit of constantly dropping their voices to a whisper. Nothing and nobody is quite what they seem. Sinden at one point accuses Baxter of 'morbid femininism' (sic). Sexual relationships of all kinds are treated surprisingly realistically, and the UK prime minister's father in law is not bad in a small part.

Terrible but like a lot of bad films, undeniably entertaining, "Mix Me A Person" was a 'hard-hitting' (for that read, X certificate), British film dealing with crime, punishment, teenage delinquents and what appears to be the IRA. Anne Baxter, whose career was on a somewhat downward spiral at the time, is the psychiatrist trying to prove Adam Faith's innocence on a charge of murder. She also happens to be married to his barrister, Donald Sinden. Lots of flashbacks tell us that Adam is indeed innocent while in the present Anne takes on the role of investigating snoop. The dialogue, by Ian Dalrymple, is laughably bad as is Leslie Norman's insipid direction but it gallops along and it's always fun seeing someone like Baxter slumming it. Needless to say the film wasn't a success and has all but disappeared. Don't seek it out but should it come your way, you could do a lot worse.

Adam Faith shows Anne Baxter and Donald Sinden a thing or two about natural acting. While they play to the gallery, the 50s/60s pop idol nicely underplays his part as a young lad charged with murder. The scriptwriter/production designer/director has a ludicrous, but typical idea of what 'upper-class' Sinden calls a teddy-boy (already a dated idea in 1962.) Faith and his mates are a neatly attired, clean-cut crowd, hanging out in an espresso bar, decked with pictures of Ella Fitzgerald and Chris Barber (!) - a more likely venue for 40 year olds at that time. It was the pre-Beatles era, and most British films were very myopic in their portrayals of youth, although 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' had hit the screens two years previously. This does seem like the Tunbridge-Wells version of youth gone astray,and accordingly it wasn't exactly a box-office smash. The clunky plot has more than one handy coincidence, and while the portrayal of the working classes is condescending, at least Anne Baxter's psychiatrist character gets to voice her opinion that people are human beings and should be treated as such. Jack MacGowran shines as a villain, as does Alfred Burke as a humane screw, and it's good to see Aussies Ed Deveraux and Ray Barrett playing senior coppers, but generally the whole pic is just a budget cut above one of the typical British supporting features that were still being produced at the time.