Echo of Diana

'Echo of Diana' is one of those British B-Movies that does exactly what one expects... Entertains, with mystery and suspense.. Typically cast with those 50s-60s b list actors, that deliver to the best of their talent... Actress Betty Mcdowell, is a dead ringer for the actress Jane Griffiths... I completely get them mixed up, they're almost like twin sisters..... Dermot Walsh pops up towards the end...

I recommend this enjoyable mystery on a Sunday afternoon:).

Having seen this 60s black & white crime drama quite a few times now, I find It' still enjoyable to watch whenever aired on 'Talking Tv'. Nostalgia eat your heart out.! British 50s/60s B-movie-crime genre, I recommend you watch them, as they're always entertaining with a great, (mostly underrated) cast. Having a large collection of this genre recorded now, Sunday afternoons seem to be mostly spent catching up viewing them all...:) Nostalgia & loving memories again come to mind... family, and my own upbringing in the 60s seem very close to my Mothers generation growing up during the war and experiencing the 50s as portrayed in these classic 50s-60s Classic British fashionable movies.. A hearty Memorable nod to our past...!

Like most Cold War thrillers the plot is largely incomprehensible. But like most British 'B' movies of the early sixties it doesn't really matter as one savours the cool black & white photography, old cars and buttoned-down Jackie Kennedy-style elegance of Betty McDowall and Clare Owen as the ladies caught up in a rather dream-like web of intrigue (which even requires the former to go beguilingly blonde at one point). Plus an even more than usually weird little cameo from Marianne Stone in glasses like bottle bottoms.

It's all oddly haunting to experience; aided by a guitar & bongo drums score by Martin Slavin more suited to a film set on the Mediterranean and seldom paying much attention to what's actually going on but which lingers on when the film is over...

Dermott Walsh has disappeared. His wife, Betty McDowall, believes his private plane has gone down, and him with it. Then the radio announces that authorities believe they have found the crashed plane near the Turkish border, and her friend, Clare Owen, points out a notice in the personal ads of a paper: "In Memoriam, Philip Scott (Walsh), killed in an air crash June 4; Fondest love. No regrets. Diana."

Miss McDowall is called into Scotland Yard, where Geoffrey Toone tells her there are spy matters going on. At that point, things become confused.

It's a nice little mystery wrapped in a spy thriller, with mysterious spy rings and no one to trust. It's a cheap little thriller, but the actors speak their lines as if they mean them and there's no clear answer to whodunnit until the big reveal at the end. Not bad at all.

In the days of the cold war, many films and TV series were based on the themes of espionage and mysterious disappearances. It was unsurprising that second-feature specialists Butcher's would produce one in this genre.

However, this is well-plotted and genuinely suspenseful in parts, with a good twist in the tail. If the low budget is obvious in the production values, the acting is solid, especially Vincent Ball as the journalist who is more than he appears and Betty MacDowall in her specialist rôle as the grieving widow.

This is quite an enthralling little low budget British thriller as "Joan" (Betty McDowell) starts to investigate the suspicious death of her husband in a plane crash on the Turkish border. Was he a spy? We set out to discover with the help of journalists "Pam" (Clare Owen) and "Bill" (Vincent Ball) what exactly happened - is he actually dead? Ernest Morris was an old hand at keeping these moving along a-pace and does so adequately here, too, with plenty of double-crosses to keep it interesting. The jungle-drums music is of the time, and no less annoying for that - it is no substitute for taut writing.