Girl in the Headlines

There were thousands of this kind of topics, especially in the British film industry, and this one remains in the good ones, though there is nothing exceptional. You have to like this atmosphere, I don't, and Ian Hendry is as good as ever in the detective, inspector, role a police officer who has the habit to remove his shoes at home and in his office, behind his desk. The little charm of this kind of production. I would have enjoyed it if there had not been a mystery scheme. It is not 1.66 frame but 2.35. That's the way I saw it on my TV set. The last minute worth the whole suspense. Even less than last minute.

This film has recently surfaced on Movies4Men.It is the sort of police drama that would be the support to some big American film at the Odeon or ABC.Ian hendry who stars in this ,should really have become a big star,but his career spiraled downward in the seventies mainly due to his drinking which eventually killed him at a very early age.I in fact saw him in a sorry state in a pub in Golders Green Road.The film is really a bit of a mess.There are too many suspects with lots of red herrings.the murderer is rather unlikely with no clues given as to the killers identity.The detectives always just get home when the phone rings and they have to go out again.You just wonder at the great overtime bills they must be clocking up.They literally plod around crime scenes picking up items willy nilly in a way that could easily wipe any prints.Clearly no SOCO at that time.Ronald Fraser plays the slightly comic detective.However i have to say that all this film induced in me was sleep.

A slow and fairly ordinary murder mystery story saved only by the appearance and great acting of Jeremy Brett who later in his career most excellently portrayed, Sherlock Holmes.

Inspector Ian Hendry and his sergeant, Ronald Fraser, are at the scene of a murder.A girl who makes her living as a model is dead in her apartment. Their investigation starts with her upstairs neighbor, a famous television actor, and continues slowly, from a painter with a rough marriage, to a gambling club, and eventually to the shady world of the drug trade.

It's a bit slow and ponderous over the course of its 90 minutes, and eventually the solution is pulled out at the last minute, quite unfairly for the mystery form. The major point of the movie is the contrast between Hendry's utterly normal home life and the dark and dismal world into which his investigations take him, leading eventually to a confrontation in a graveyard.

It's certainly well acted, with the reliable performer Fraser showing more flashes of wit than his rough appearance usually permitted him during his career. It's a worthwhile movie, until it fell to pieces for me at the very end.

I imagine this film was made towards the end of 1962, as it was released in June 1963. Directed by the underused and good director Michael Truman ( who made ' Touch and Go' a highly rated comedy but underrated today ) it shows in stark black and white a new era in our troubled social lives. This in my opinion happens every 60 years or so, and we are entering a new one since 2020. ' Girl in the Headlines ' is about the search for the killer of a party ' girl ' and model, and like an unwanted ghost she hovers over the whole film and no one really grieves for her. London and its mainly focused trendy new fashions and lifestyles are just beginning, and this springtime of a new era shows us a gallery of characters each with their secrets and their mainly empty lives. Promiscuity in sexuality, a prurient media and drug filled lives revolve around all of them. Jeremy Brett ( a troubled man himself ) portrays a young man of the times, partly looking backwards, partly towards the future, and his handsome face seems to dread it. Margaret Johnston ( one of the UK's finest actors who was excellent in Truman's ' Touch and Go ' ) plays the dead woman's mother; an enigmatic and lonely figure looking back to a life that has nothing to do with the pop ephemera around her. Natasha Parry ( one of our best actors about to leave the UK for arguably better roles with Peter Brook, again arguably the UK's best director lost to the UK for Paris. ) plays the wife of an artist who abuses her emotionally, and there are hints of bisexuality. Ian Hendry and Ronald Fraser play the detectives and for me both of them paled in acting abilities compared to the three mentioned above. They represent the dying era and its own boredoms but that does not excuse below par acting which sadly dominated the film by them, especially in the last half of the film. I must single out two scenes; one in a ' dead ' house where we see relics of the past of a former Opera singer, and this beautifully filmed sequence is played out in silence to a recoding of Bellini's ' Casta Diva ' from his opera ' Norma. ' This alone deserves the full eight I am giving this film, and shows a magical touch that Michael Truman showed in his direction of ' Touch and Go. ) The second scene is set in a gay club after the murder of a famous actor, and the way the ' suspects ' are led away by the police shows just how these still legally ' criminals ' are abjectly treated. The look on Ian Hendry's face says it all. The club itself appeared to be the ' Gigolo ' in Chelsea below a fashionable restaurant above it and joined to it called ' the Casserole ' and frequented by a lot of the famous people of the time. A good film, patchy in parts, but for all those interested in an era that has just slipped by us well worth watching.