Breakaway

Another nostalgic visit to a fifties London filled with big cars and empty streets. This potboiler about the usual attempts by nasty foreigners to get their clammy mitts on a formula crucial to winning the Cold War as usual has excellent photography by co.producer Monty Berman competing with an obtrusive score by Stanley Black.

About as humble as anything in which Honor Blackman and Arthur Lowe found themselves treading water before eventually becoming household names in the sixties; Miss Blackman here actually suffers the indignity of being billed third after wide boy Michael Balfour sporting an incredible Teddy Boy wig and a taste for loud clothes.

I got this movie because it was one of three Honor Blackman movies that I did not own. It's just been released as an R2 DVD, part of a series called "The Best of British Collection". The disc rated U runs 71 minutes and is of course PAL format.The quality of the print is excellent.

The movie is about the search for a formula to combat metal fatigue, an important issue at the time following the Comet disasters. It's not particularly good with a couple of so so car chases and contrived fights. I'd rent it rather than buy it.

Honor Blackman has smallish part, Freddie Mills is a friend of the hero and Michael Balfour, who seems to pop up in bits in just about every British movie of the period has his longest part that I have ever seen as the lovable, dumb factotum of the hero Tom Conway.

Not much here even as historical interest.

Former FALCON Tom Conway in the second Tom 'Duke' Martin private eye flicks made in Britain during the film noir 1950's, with the right balance of gunplay, mystery and polite traipsing from various locations... from mansions to airports... gathering clues wherein sidekick Michael Balfour's overweight, ex-crook Barney is the better fighter during the rare times where that kind of risky thing happens...

Yet the villain and his henchman (including a young John Colicos) still mean business, having kidnapped beautiful Honor Blackman's beautiful sister, who might be carrying a scientist's secret that everyone's after...

Nothing like the tough guy American Humphrey Bogart vehicles from the previous decade, BREAKAWAY is as lightweight British yet still desperately urgent, keeping both the dignified snoop and audience on edge... despite knowing almost exactly who the villains are.

In West Berlin, a German scientist named Professor Dohlman has been working on a formula which may reduce metal fatigue. He is, however, dying and gives the formula to Johnny Matlock (Brian Worth) with the instruction that it should be passed on to the young man's brother Michael Matlock (John Horsley).

Johnny is in a relationship with Michael's secretary Diane (Paddy Webster) and meets her at the airport on his return to England. Also entering the country is the suave, unflappable private detective Tom 'Duke' Martin (Tom Conway) who is welcomed by his friend, the former petty criminal Barney Wilson (Michael Balfour). Soon, Matlock and the girl are kidnapped with only Diane's abandoned handbag remaining. 'Duke' investigates and learns that Diane was due to meet someone the following evening at a nightclub. He makes the appointment himself and meets the glamorous Paula (Honor Blackman), who turns out to be Diane's sister. Determined to return Diane's possessions personally, 'Duke' discovers that everyone else wants to steal them. It seems that the formula is contained somewhere in the bag and he must find it before the bad guys kill Diane.

This routine B-film was produced by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, who would later have such tremendous success on television with The Saint. It is a sequel to Barbados Quest, made the same year, and again stars Tom Conway in a role identical to 'The Falcon', a character he played in ten B-films for RKO in the 1940s. The plot is a little more straightforward this time, albeit less interesting with its focus on corporate espionage. Confusingly, two actors reappear from the first film in different roles, which is jarring if one sees these back to back. John Horsley's Inspector Taylor is nowhere to be seen and the actor instead plays the sensible scientist at odds with his scheming brother, who played the bad guy last time out. There is a welcome appearance from the always excellent Alexander Gauge and a cameo from future Dad's Army star Arthur Lowe, while real-life boxer Freddie Mills is stunt-cast as a two-fisted barman.

Both films are reasonably entertaining, but less pacey than The Falcon films and seem to have a lower budget too. They are basically a couple of pilots for a television series which never materialised, but are efficient timewasters all the same. Conway is always watchable and was born to play such suave and darkly handsome characters. More so, I believe, than his brother George Sanders, who seemed ever so slightly lecherous when in similar roles. Conway was passed fifty here, and was beginning to show it, but proved nonetheless that he could have played the Falcon for a lot longer had RKO allowed it.

This is a lot of fun, but only if seen before or after BARBADOS QUEST. Both productions have Tom Conway and Michael Balfour playing the same characters while another 4 or 5 actors appear in both films playing different roles including John Colicos, who should forever be distinguished as the 1st Klingon seen on STAR TREK. In addition, both films were released within a few months of each other suggesting the possibility of interchangeable film shooting which would be the envy of Roger Corman, or Orson Welles.

All credit to Berman and Baker for not only making full use of their alloted time and money, but probably also using the Tom Conway character as a dry run for THE SAINT tv series which they produced a few years later.

After all this the quality of this film's plot and performances is almost incidental.