Mark of the Phoenix

Is this enjoyably unbelievable Cold War thriller for real? At least some of the humour seems intentional as the cast teams with broadly played sinister foreign caricatures (including foxy top-billed Julia Arnall) pursuing a metal that provides protection from radioactivity.

Wilfred Burns' score when not being parodically 'French' (actually Belgian) is as usual noisily intrusive. The producers actually sent sent a crew to Belgium and as photographed by veteran Geoffrey Faithfull it all looks good.

It's also nice to see Anton Diffring and Roger Delgado working for the law for a change.

I rather lost the rather complicated plot on this one.Maybe it was the unusual sight of Anton Differing playing a good cop.however the first scene rather set my teeth on edge.A scientist is shot in the chest from about 10 feet,the killer places the gun in his hand,and for some strange reason the police assume that he committed suicide.This undermined the whole film for me.From then on the film had so many twists i reminded me of a coiled python.However at no time did it show any sign of life.Lots of location shooting but to no real effect.A really poor effort,and rather a waste of time.The title is rather misleading.

The film has an interesting and complex plot dotted with humour, as perhaps expected from the combination of its writer's experiences, as a post WWII commando in the Royal Marines, an Oxford University graduate in English literature, a technical translator and an associate professor. Desmond Cory's prolific writing career produced 45 spy thrillers as well as several screenplays, radio scripts, children's books and academic papers.

In Mark of the Phoenix we have real locations, which give the plot more authenticity than the usual budget thriller. I'm not sure why IMDb has the film's location as Walton-on-Thames? Check out ReelStreets for the actual settings. Locating the action in Bruxelles is also a coup de maître, in that the Belgian education system encourages fluency in English to avoid the obvious language conflicts. Furthermore, Bruxelles is both a multicultural city and a travel hub for the rest of Europe and Asia. In the fifties however, planes and helicopters were perhaps considered more stylish than the noir-esque night train from Bruxelles to Berlin.

The Mark of the Phoenix plot works because everything has been pre-planned and by one character for a single outcome and just as a hint, it is not the delivery of a cigarette case. It's all in the title.

MARK OF THE PHOENIX is a stodgy little effort from the reliably poor Butcher's Film Service. This one tries for a Cold War vibe but ends up being poorly-plotted and rather uninteresting, with long stretches where nothing happens. The cast of rogues are hardly engaging and the storyline, about a new metal alloy which everybody's trying to get their hands on, is particularly dull.

The film features Anton Diffring and Roger Delgado as a couple of detectives on the hunt for a cigarette case, and there are various murders and fights between principal characters along the way. However, the direction is constantly pedestrian - Maclean Rogers did a lot better with some of the Paul Temple films earlier in his career - and the script from CARRY ON writer Norman Hudis fails to find any sympathetic characters in the cast. It's nice to see Diffring and Delgado playing the good guys for a change, but they have very little screen time at the end of the day.

There not being enough maguffins in the world, a Belgian scientist has invented a new one. He is promptly killed, and the maguffin turned into a silver cigarette case. In that form, it simply drops in the hands of Sheldon Lawrence, a perfectly innocent jewel thief who is vacationing in Belgium to offer samples of his handiwork to his fence, who is promptly murdered because he turned the maguffin into the cigarette case.

Lawrence is a good-looking guy who is handy with his fists and promptly wins the heart of Julia Arnall, the fiancee of Eric Pohlmann, who wants the maguffin. Other people who want it are Anton Diffring, apparently the only homicide detective in Belgium, and Bernard Rebel. They run around and make deals with Lawrence, who has already stolen Pohlmann's jewel collection by this point, and take potshots at various people because the maguffin is worth, in the immortal words of Dr. Evil, "One million dollars!" in Berlin.

This being a second feature from Butcher's and directed by the indefatigable Maclean Rogers, it will kill an hour if you're not expecting anything brilliant.