The Blue Parrot

Many British crime thrillers of the 50s are set in a nightclub.The nightclub in this film is so small and uninhabited that getting a parrot cage in might be difficult a blue budgie cage more likely.Yet again we have an "American policeman" helping Scotland Yard.Obviously the producers in this case could not afford an American actor so instead they brought in an Irishman,Dermot Walsh,who makes a woeful attempt at an American accent.Did the producers really think that this would be enough to sell this to American audiences.John Le Mesurier makes a suitably sinister club owner and Ballard Berkley plays a detective for the umpteenth time.Funny that it was not till he played "The Major" in Fawlty Towers that he ever really became famous.The plot is full of the usual contrivances and twists of the genre and is fairly unmemorable.

Direction by numbers doesn't help nor does an absence of shadow or flat focus. Aims at noir without the noir. The scene where the cast are madly winking across a 'sleazy' nightclub with no patrons and a band designed for earplugs is especially excruciating. Ballard Berkley and John LeMesurier try hard with a nuance free script and Ferdy Maine tries hard to look sinister. The film's origins with journalism are painfully obvious in a totally linear account; no sub plots, no character development, no humorous asides. The one joke is the name of the night club, 'The Blue Parrot' which is, of course, the name of Signor Ugatti's nightclub in Casablanca- maybe they should have borrowed the set designer, the extras, the scriptwriters from that film. A Sidney Greenstreet lookalike might have helped. Whole thing could have been phoned in.

British noir movies from the 40's and 50's are occasionally surprisingly very good given the fact that they were made on low budgets. This effort is rather poor. Even having just watched it I can't recall what it was all supposed to be about. A nice performance from John le Mesurier as the night club owner is the only reason to watch other than the nostalgia element of seeing actors of the period.

Victor Lucas has a lot of money for a glorified cab driver. When he's murdered and the safe he has in his flat is found to have been broken into and emptied, Scotland Yard, in the person of Ballard Berkeley investigates, with visiting Yankee copper Dermot Walsh (sporting one of those sourceless accents the British think American) goes undercover to investigate the seedy and customer-free Blue Parrot bar.

It's a pretty poor example of British crime drama, with Berkeley droning his lines, Walsh's accent variable, and pretty Jacqueline Hill as whatever the Brits call a b-girl. Shot flatly by cinematographer Robert Navarro, there's very little to recommend this bog-standard B movie. John Le Mesurier tries his best as the foreboding club owner, but it becomes apparent early on that figuring out what racket the bar is fronting for is the point of the movie, and by the time it was revealed, I didn't care.

One of the perks of the 'B' movie is that occasionally it gives a leading role to an actor one would not otherwise have associated with movies. Ten years before the role for which she is remembered in the original cast of 'Dr Who' the late Jacqueline Hill as Sgt. Maguire of the Metropolitan Police (sadly we never see her in uniform) infiltrates a Soho populated by low-lifes like spiv Ferdy Mayne (who has a vindictive high maintenance mistress amusingly played by Valerie White) and shady nightclub proprietor John LeMesurier. The latter shares the screen at one point with The Major from 'Fawlty Towers', back in the days when the police computer looks more like a loom than a machine for retrieving information.