Break in the Circle

Great location scenes at Polperro, Cornwall, and very typical of its time.

It catches the flavour of England and Cornwall in the '50s, and the hero is a proper smart and tough individual.

Eva Bartok hires skipper Forrest Tucker to smuggle scientist Arnold Marlé, As the movie progresses, various murky forces with thugs, helicopters, and police at its disposal tries to stop him.

When this was made, the forces at work were apparent and obvious to its audience; so obvious that this could easily be interpreted as paranoid anti-Communist propaganda. Nothing of the sort is ever mentioned in the movie. This would seem to make it vaguer and duller, and at the same time more universal. Indeed, some of the accompanying comment notes " Set against a war-torn backdrop, it explores the indomitable human spirit and the relentless pursuit of liberty." This seems at odds with Eric Pohlmann's willingness to get his neck broken once he's promised $5,000.

Over all, I find its lack of specificity unengaging, its use of the same block of docklands to represent several different ports cheap rather than betaking of any sort of universality. With Marius Goring and Guy Middleton.

He is in this as a deckhand.He normally plays somewhat eccentric characters.He adds some lighter touches to this rather full thriller starting a lacklustre Forrest Tucker.Made by a pre horror Hammer more than likely as part of their deal with Lippert.The film starts slowly and crawls to a full stop.

It's a fast thriller constantly gaining speed, and it is not easy to follow all the sudden turns for good and for worse in this violent action stew of intrigue. A scientist is successfully smuggled out of East Germany and hidden in "a safe place" at the harbour of Hamburg, a very rugged place to my liking, from where an English skipper (Forrest Tucker) is paid handsomely to get him out of there over to England. The problem is there are others also interested in this case of an important Polish scientist with advanced knowledge of matters beyond anyone's conception. So there are some hunts both to save him and to get him, and when finally the guns come out to force the situation, Forrest Tucker begins to have had enough of fisticuffs and assaults and atrocities hounding him everywhere, while Eva Bartok in what must be regarded as one of her best roles actually finally saves the situation by her own bold initiatives and civil courage. It's a fast and entertaining film, Val Guest knew how to make such films of sustained action and suspense, and at least you will not be bored.

I am staggeringly behind with the "House of Hammer" podcast at the moment, so I'm only now watching this film that they did back in June of last year. "Break in the Circle" is not exactly a noir-y thriller like most Hammer films at the time, but it's a post-war spy adventure type film, which saw them actually travel outside the UK for filming.

Captain Skip Morgan (Forrest Tucker) is tasked with taking a trip to Hamburg and expatriating a Polish scientist, Pal Kudnic (Arnold Marle) back to the UK. Kudnic's friend, Baron Keller (Marius Goring) will pay him handsomely to do so. Upon learning that his would be girlfriend, Lisa (Eve Bartok) has been informing on his dealings to Scotland Yard, Morgan tricks her into joining him on the trip. They arrive at Hamburg and to the rendezvous point, but all is not as it seems.

With a lot of these Hammer films, I've tended to find that my most common reaction was boredom and drifting onto my phone. This one though kept my interest and that's keeping in mind that I was watching a print of the film that is on Youtube and neither the sound nor picture quality were what you would hope for. I was impressed by the budget spent on this one, as not only did they relocate to Hamburg for at least some of the shooting time, but also some scenes involved the use of a helicopter - and not stock footage of a helicopter as it would have been previously, but one hired for the production!

Though I watched it all and didn't get distracted, I would say that film could be improved upon. It's quite long, most Hammer films at the time were nearer the hour mark and this is twenty-five or so minutes longer than that. I appreciate that Eva Bartok is probably the most famous performer in the film, the only one I'd previously heard of anyway, but I don't know why her characters exists and is in the film as much as she is, other than so the film has a woman in it. It was never entirely clear to me why Scotland Yard were keeping tabs on Morgan in the first place, I can only assume there was some postwar smuggling going on.

Let's not go overboard, I wouldn't recommend the film to anyone not actively listening to the podcast, but compared to some of the others I've watched, this was reasonable.