River Patrol

Another one endured for the excellent "House of Hammer" podcast, this time the 1948 film (I say film, it's only about 40 minutes) "River Patrol", which is perhaps the most inexplicable movie that Hammer has produced so far.

Robbie Robinson (John Blythe) is part of River Patrol, a post-war Police department patrolling the coasts and rivers dealing with smugglers, gangsters and other water-based shenanigans. Charged with infiltrating a gang smuggling nylon tights into the UK, Robbie and Jean Nichols (Lorna Dean) pose as alcohol smugglers and supply booze to The Guv (Wally Patch) and his gambling club.

"River Patrol" is pretty awful, often hilariously so. Hammily acted, with yet more the of the terrible fight scenes that we saw in the Dick Barton series, but at least the Dick Barton's had a story to them... in one case, a pretty good one. Here, our heroes wander about until they find their way into a gang, not necessarily "the" gang, but one nevertheless. Robbie tries to sneak into a base of operations, gets knocked out, wakes up, scuffles with the head gangster, that's about it. There are plot points, such as they murder of another member of the patrol in the opening scene, that appear to be establishing story beats to pay of later, but either then were lost in the edit, or just filmed to pad out the run time to make it to "B" picture territory.

The sound recording (at least on the version on Youtube) is awful, several lines are lost but to scratchy microphones, but then also to a generic music score that plays under most of the film and drowns bits of it out.

I mean, having said all that, and laid out it's many flaws, it was obviously made cheap, very cheap so perhaps picking on it is mean spirited. It is also, as I said, at times unintentionally hilarious. I'll never watch it again but I might remember it for a while.

There's a gun battle on the Thames and John Blythe's assistant is killed. But there something far more dire; the Home Office is upset because someone is selling nylons cheap! So Blythe and assistant Lorna Dean tramp the Docklands until they wind up at Wally Patch's gambling club, where they sell him a few cases of bootleg whisky.

Patch's real racket is buying a lot of stockings in France, killing the seller with his sword-cane and tossing the body overboard. Meanwhile, Miss Dean is kidnapped and stored right next to a telephone, where she can call her boss to rescue her and Blythe, who is knocked around by Patch.

Not only are there obviously mismatched shots; not only is the score bucolic Romantic music (with boogie-woogie for the gambling club) played off scratchy wax cylinders until the 38-minute mark of this 45-minute movie, but this seems to have been shot in Hammer's legendary Marleybone Studio, where each stage was about the size of a bedsit, but.... well, it's worse than even that.

Stunningly awful.

This film was made by Hammer at Marylebone Studios.Clearly these studios were about the size of a broom cupboard.In one scene set in a detectives room one of the actors actually has to come in sideways in order to sit at a desk.The leading man is John Blithe,here cast as a river policeman,normally playing spivs.He is on the case of a nylon smuggling gang led by the redoubtable Wally Patch.In one scene Patch stabs someone with his swordstick.Only we don't see the victim as the studio is to small to get everyone in view.The climactic fight between Blithe and Patch at the end is too funny to be true.I wonder if they had a fight co ordinator in those days.As entertaining as a low budget film like this could expect to be.

I don't usually write reviews, but this film is so awful I felt obliged to comment on it.

Firstly, the lighting is really poor. In some of the night scenes it's hard to tell what's going on, and even the studio set (where nearly the whole film takes place) is poorly lit.

There's also no proper sense of movement between scenes. They cut abruptly from one to the next without proper continuity because the film was so cheaply made.

And to judge from the limited camerawork and background music I would've guessed that this was made in the 1930's rather than 1948.

This is one of the worst films I've seen in a long while.