Girl in the Headlines

And no Christie either.Hence a rather unexciting detective story which blends Agatha's whodunit with film noir elements.A bevy of characters is overkill in lieu of a well-constructed mystery.The performances are a bit listless and the director tries a hand at humor with one of his inspectors'cold.Attshoo!

The most interesting in this movie is the settings,chiefly in the second half.One of them seems to be a gay bar,but the word (it's 1963)is not uttered;Some scenes are filmed on location on the Thames banks; a chase in a graveyard is rather good.

Nevertheless,it will satisfy neither Christie's countless following (the plot is too poor) nor the film noir buffs (too watered-down and not enough ambiguity).Stick with Hercule,Jane,and co.

There were thousands of this kind of topics, especially in the British film industry, and this one remains in the good ones, though there is nothing exceptional. You have to like this atmosphere, I don't, and Ian Hendry is as good as ever in the detective, inspector, role a police officer who has the habit to remove his shoes at home and in his office, behind his desk. The little charm of this kind of production. I would have enjoyed it if there had not been a mystery scheme. It is not 1.66 frame but 2.35. That's the way I saw it on my TV set. The last minute worth the whole suspense. Even less than last minute.

Also given the pedestrian title THE MODEL MURDER CASE, this British Neo Noir has a perfectly cast Ian Hendry with Ronald Fraser as cop partners (Inspector and Sergeant) with such terrific chemistry it's a shame there weren't more films, or perhaps a television series where GIRL IN THE HEADLINES would be a merely passable episode albeit filled with fantastic looking sets showcasing pallid wealth... in a mystery thriller that needed not only more thrills but far more action...

A shame too that the titular model, shown all through the opening credits and even the first several minutes (seated dead in someone else's living room), isn't credited anywhere...

Her character is quite something, making this a kind of LAURA where the corpse has a life all its own, albeit not through any flashbacks...

The suspects/her friends though are very similar: a group of big money lowlifes including a flamboyant TV star (James Villiers); a shady nightclub owner (Kieron Moore); a handsome sailor who could be trafficking drugs (Jeremy Brett); the girl's sullen mother (Margaret Johnston); and an even more sullen married couple...

Meanwhile Ian Hendry, who'd wind down his career playing cold-blooded villains, looks square-jawed classy here, befitting the stalwart lead whether in plush interior investigations with his quirky, even snoopier partner, or at home with pretty teenage daughter Jane Asher, whose mom (his wife) is more of a cool older sister...

Again, these primary leads all seem part of something else... bigger, more expanded... and it's too bad they're stuck in one single just-good-enough time-filling thriller...

Everyone... even the dead girl... deserved better: Like in HER case, an actual name!

A slow and fairly ordinary murder mystery story saved only by the appearance and great acting of Jeremy Brett who later in his career most excellently portrayed, Sherlock Holmes.

Inspector Ian Hendry and his sergeant, Ronald Fraser, are at the scene of a murder.A girl who makes her living as a model is dead in her apartment. Their investigation starts with her upstairs neighbor, a famous television actor, and continues slowly, from a painter with a rough marriage, to a gambling club, and eventually to the shady world of the drug trade.

It's a bit slow and ponderous over the course of its 90 minutes, and eventually the solution is pulled out at the last minute, quite unfairly for the mystery form. The major point of the movie is the contrast between Hendry's utterly normal home life and the dark and dismal world into which his investigations take him, leading eventually to a confrontation in a graveyard.

It's certainly well acted, with the reliable performer Fraser showing more flashes of wit than his rough appearance usually permitted him during his career. It's a worthwhile movie, until it fell to pieces for me at the very end.