Clegg

This being a Lindsay Shonteff film you expect the worst but by his standards it's not that bad. Repeat: BY HIS STANDARDS. Which were never terribly high. Clegg is a movie that would like to be a lot better than it is and has lofty ambitions but never has the cleverness to achieve them. The plot is mildly intriguing (old men are getting cards telling them they will soon die) but never really goes anywhere, and to say there's a lack of sympathy for the lead character would be an understatement. He gives us a voice-over narration of a fairly hackneyed nature throughout. The film really runs out of steam by the end - it's like the director couldn't think of any novel way to wrap things up. On the plus side there's some nice location shooting of 1969 London, which looks as beautiful as 1960s London always did. Hard to catch nowadays, Clegg is a movie unlikely to turn up on terrestrial TV - maybe on cable in the middle of the night though.

I have wanted to see Clegg ever since I watched the first disk of 42nd Street Forever trailers where the film's trailer was shown under the title The Bullet Machine. Unfortunately, the film proved very hard to find in the U.S. (and maybe the U.K. too). I had to settle for a poorly panned and scanned copy that rendered the action scenes hard to follow.

The film seems to be a (very) low budget mixture of Get Carter and an American hardboiled detective film. Harry Clegg is an ex-cop turned P.I. and on the dishonest side (and on the borderline incompetent side). At the beginning of the movie, Clegg is ambushed in the country by one of his less than satisfied customers who has paid two goons to kill Clegg. After dispensing with the three, Clegg returns to London and gets another job. The well-to-do Lord Cruikshank has received a threatening letter that he wants Clegg to investigate. Cruikshank believes the man responsible is an embezzler who was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but Cruikshank is not too forthcoming with other details. Clegg calls up a lady friend still on the force (Clegg has a lot of lady friends who do his work for him). Clegg learns that the embezzler died in prison twelve years earlier. Meanwhile, a female killer with rifle is eliminating some of Cruikshank's former associates.

The film does not have much of a mystery. Most of the film consists of Clegg (the not exactly dashing Gilbert Wynne) wandering around, sleeping with an unlikely attractive woman, and getting into fights with goons. The film holds the viewer just interested enough to keep him watching but not enough for him to get involved in the plot or the characters. The action scenes are hard to judge out of the correct aspect ratio. I was disappointed that, in spite of the way it is played up in the trailer, Clegg never squares off against the female hitwoman, nor is her character as prominent as she appears from the preview.

Clegg was directed by Lindsay Shonteff, a director that not many people have much love for. I am not quite sure why. I have sat through much worse than Clegg from lesser directors like Al Adamson and Ted V. Mikels, both of whom have a cult following. I rather like Shonteff's The Fast Kill. Clegg is not as good, but it is watchable enough on a boring afternoon. I probably wouldn't watch the film again, even in a better, correctly letterboxed copy.