Man from Tangier

The Old Bill as usual are always several steps behind the criminal activities of a bunch of smooth foreign crooks described as 'Passport Racketeers' (today they would be called people traffickers) in this typically slick late fifties Lance Comfort potboiler.

Talky but good-looking (both indoors and in and around a wintry-looking London in the days when one could park straight away on a whim) thanks to his veteran cameraman Basil Emmott and to cool blonde Lisa Gastoni as the female lead. The one liability is the usual noisy score by Wilfred Burns.

And so Butcher's Films churn out another routine programmer without much in the way to distinguish it from a dozen other, similar productions. MAN FROM TANGIER is a film that spends every penny of its tight budget on exotic locales and a varied cast while at the same time telling the most ordinary subject imaginable. This one hinges on a case of mistaken identity - the identity of a COAT - if you can believe that...

The set-up is that a crook's coat gets mixed up with the coat of an American actor, thus transporting the latter into a world of crime. There are the requisite glamorous women and double crosses, and a few action scenes dotted here and there, but this is never more than a very typical, very ordinary, would be thriller.

Messy low-budget effort from low-rent British outfit Butcher which starts out quite brightly but quickly gets bogged down by confusing plot developments. With his car salesman's 'tache, Robert Hutton looks far too cheesy to be a hero.

It's hard to believe that films like this once made it onto the big screen, even as B-pictures. Actually, to call "The Man from Tangier" a B-picture is probably too kind, C-picture or D-picture might be more accurate.

The title was presumably intended to lure filmgoers with the promise of exotic thrills but only the first few minutes are set in Tangier (courtesy of some stock footage) and for the rest of the time we're back in grimy old London, more familiar Butchers Film territory. He-man hero Robert Hutton, via a ridiculous chain of coincidences, gets mixed up with foreign femme fatale Lisa Gastoni and her shady associates, whilst stoical Scotland Yard 'tec Ballard Berkeley mulls over the clues.

Lance Comfort made some interesting films during the immediate post-war boom in British cinema but the big break never materialised, leaving him becalmed in second-feature land. The anti-climactic ending to this effort (there's not even time for hero and heroine to say "I love you") suggests that, like the audience, he had lost all interest in the turgid tale of the Man from Tangier.

Good British b movie romp, enjoyable, but could have much better with a more serious score making a superior soundtrack for the film.