Assignment Redhead

This was a truly awful British thriller.It is impossible to find a good word to say about it.The acting veers from the mediocre to the amateur.Who thought that Danny Green could handle a foreign accent?The fight scenes are so badly arranged that each blow manages to be seen to miss its target by about one foot.Some of it doesn't even make sense.There is one scene towards the end when Demetrius and his partner drive into a wood to agree on a split.We next see a policeman get off his bike.Then we go back to the pair.A gun goes off but no policeman.We don't ever see him again.Demetrius kills his partner and pushes the car with him inside over a cliff,cue an abysmal model shot.At the end there is a fire in a warehouse and it is quite obvious that the smoke is an exposure over the main picture.This is the sort of film that gives B movies a bad name!

... but wasn't. If the Walmington-on-Sea Amateur Dramatic Society had been given a postal order for four pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence and invited to write, shoot and act out a film about Nazi contraband, the good burghers of Walmington would have come up with something slicker and more sophisticated than this.

Gregory Keen is a handsome American intelligence officer seconded to the British secret service in the wake of World War Two and the Berlin Blockade. His task is to thwart the nefarious plans of dastardly supercrook Dumetrius, "a man who's butchered his way half across Europe - and whom it's up to you to get!" (Yes, that really is quoted from the script.)

This awful British film of the Austerity period defines the term "amateurish". Clumsy fight scenes, un-scary bad guys like the cuddly Yotti Blum (Danny Green), a French secret agent with a crazy accent swanning around London wearing an inconspicuous beret, dreadful lines such as "You unclean cretin!" - need I go on?

The action, written and directed by someone called Maclean Rogers, is full from start to finish of absurd improbabilities. For the assassination attempt, why would the decrepit sexuagenarian Dumetrius (Ronald Adam) climb onto a rooftop with a rifle? Doesn't he have henchmen for that sort of thing? And how did he know that his 'target' would appear at this very window? In the warehouse denouement, how come the smoke doesn't move when the camera pans? It couldn't possibly be a cheaply overlaid special effect, could it? How come Rubinstein can give up half his fortune, which he protected from the rapacioua Nazis, with as much equanimity as if he were handing over a box of matches?

Coutts describes Dumetrius in one of the script's many indigestible mouthfuls as "cunning, ruthless, completely unscrupulous and will stop at nothing". One cannot help but wish that at least some of the bad guy's demonic energy had infused a few of the other people involved in this project. Nothing whatsoever in this feeble farrago comes close to being convincing. The appearance of Dumetrius, in disguise, on a routine military flight out of Berlin is plain ludicrous (wouldn't there be just the slightest risk that someone might KNOW the British officer he's trying to impersonate?), but no more ludicrous than the presence on the same flight of Hedy Bergner (Carole Matthews), the allegedly glamorous accordion player, journeying to London to play a single gig at a night club. Putting aside the universally-held view that the last time the accordion was a cool instrument was NEVER, what is she doing on a military transport? Was the accordion in so much demand in 1956? Wasn't Jimmy Shand available? And did she obtain that coiffure by letting the regimental goat chew her hair? Marzatti's is as trashy and unbelievable as one might expect - a night club depicted by someone who's never been to a night club, for an audience that has never been to one either. Why isn't Sally Jennings fazed when the strange man grabs her in the dark?

Richard Denning plays Keen, a phenomenon all too common in British films of the era - a token American, brought in to add "class". Well, compared to the rest of the movie, perhaps he succeeds. Such things are relative.

This was a slightly more ambitious project than usual from the Butcher's company, with the budget stretching to hire two American stars. Richard Denning is Major Keen, seconded to MI5 from US military intelligence; not something he shows a great deal of as he blunders about, arresting the wrong man. Informed of the activities of the arch villain Dumetrius, he responds "sounds like a lot of nonsense to me", which is a fair summary of the narrative. Carole Mathews, soon after her labours in Roger Corman's SWAMP WOMEN, provides the glamour as the enigmatic Hedy, and redhead or not she still looks pretty good. One memorable scene has her trying to cope with a large accordion, in what must be London's smallest ever nightclub. Ronald Adam, playing Dumetrius was notable for his incredibly full and busy life, fighting in both World Wars, including being shot down while on active duty in the Royal Flying Corps in the First, as well as later founding theatrical groups and appearing in hundreds of stage plays, films and TV productions. He brings his customary authority to the role, but hardly suggests the kind of cosmopolitan, chameleon like character indicated by the script.

Director Maclean Rogers wrote the screenplay after adapting Lindsay Hardy's 'Requiem for a Redhead' perhaps unwisely lifting whole chunks of dialogue from the book in the process. It appears from the gaps and inconsistencies in the second half of the film that he then found himself tearing pages of it up again. Peter Ridgeway and his pal in the bowler with the monster hangover, Digby Mitchel, are built up then dropped suddenly, while Peter Swanwick's Paul Bonnet, straight from the 'Allo 'Allo school of Frenchmen appears from nowhere but is intimately acquainted with everything that's gone on. Alex Gallier gives an enjoyable performance in a small role as a smooth ex-Nazi whom Dumetrius intends to double-cross. The conclusion, a fight to the death on the roof of a burning building, is an almost identical copy of the ending of Rogers' PAUL TEMPLE RETURNS, made almost five years earlier, including some of the same footage, dialogue and music.

This used to turn up on TV quite often and I've long had something of a soft spot for it, in spite of, or perhaps because, of its ham-fisted approach and lumbering fight scenes. It has all the flaws and pleasures of many other British second features of the period; you either like them or you don't.

Butcher's Film Productions made a mixed bag of films for sure but ASSIGNMENT REDHEAD has to be one of their very worst. It's a sloppily made post-war thriller with bad editing and a generally dull murder mystery storyline that never seems to go anywhere despite the intriguing storyline. In it, the authorities are hunting for a master criminal who they know was travelling on a particular plane. They have a cast of suspects to choose from, but which of them is it?

The format of the film is of a stodgy police procedural with little incident or action to recommend it, and when the action does hit it's very uninteresting. It doesn't help that few of the British cast members are up to the job of putting on a convincing European accent, and there's a romantic sub-plot that drags things down still further. Although I consider myself a fan of Butcher's Films I think this is their worst yet.

....They certainly weren't wrong when they said that.

It made me think of that hilarious quote, snooker on black and white TV, where's the yellow? It's behind the green and next to the pink.... who was the redhead? Slightly interesting marketing.

It's not a classic, it screams b movie in terms of budget, acting, cast, sadly the story isn't even that good.

The story is dreary, but ambitious, it doesn't show the British or American services in a good light, they're all a little on the dim side.

Richard Denning looks the part, and delivers arguably a good performance, the trouble is that he's working with a very poor script, it's clunky and disjointed, the dialogue lacks any sort of life.

Carole Mathews, I didn't think was great, at times she sounds Spanish, sometimes Dutch, and other times she sounds like Miss Popov from Rentaghost.

It has a certain charm, one I find applies to many movies and shows from this era, so if you enjoy the atmosphere, clothes, cars, dodgy fight scenes, you'll possibly find this passable. 5/10.