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Cover Girl Killer

  • 1959
  • Not Rated
  • 1h 1m
IMDb RATING
5.9/10
503
YOUR RATING
Cover Girl Killer (1959)
GialloSerial KillerCrimeThriller

Set in the sleazy world of a backstreet 1950s nightclub, a serial killer is believed to be murdering the models of a glamour magazine.Set in the sleazy world of a backstreet 1950s nightclub, a serial killer is believed to be murdering the models of a glamour magazine.Set in the sleazy world of a backstreet 1950s nightclub, a serial killer is believed to be murdering the models of a glamour magazine.

  • Director
    • Terry Bishop
  • Writer
    • Terry Bishop
  • Stars
    • Harry H. Corbett
    • Felicity Young
    • Spencer Teakle
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    5.9/10
    503
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Terry Bishop
    • Writer
      • Terry Bishop
    • Stars
      • Harry H. Corbett
      • Felicity Young
      • Spencer Teakle
    • 26User reviews
    • 7Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Photos36

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    Top cast19

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    Harry H. Corbett
    Harry H. Corbett
    • The Man
    Felicity Young
    Felicity Young
    • June
    Spencer Teakle
    • John
    Victor Brooks
    • Brunner
    Bernadette Milnes
    • Gloria
    Christina Gregg
    • Joy
    Tony Doonan
    • Sergeant
    John Barrard
    John Barrard
    • Lennie Ross
    Alan Edwards
    • Hodgkins
    Charles Lloyd Pack
    • Captain Adams
    Dermot Kelly
    • Pop
    Denis Holmes
    • Actor
    Julie Shearing
    • Rosie
    Tony Thawnton
    Tony Thawnton
    • Doctor
    Paddy Joyce
    Paddy Joyce
    • Stagehand
    Claude Jones
    • Constable Jones
    John Baker
    • Plainclothes Man
    Frank Barringer
    • Detective
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Terry Bishop
    • Writer
      • Terry Bishop
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews26

    5.9503
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    Featured reviews

    7Alanjackd

    sweet and sour

    This movie for me is very much a sweet and sour affair. One the one hand I think Steptoe and Son is the finest comedy ever but also I think if it would never have happened we could and should have seen Harry H Corbett as one of Britains finest actors. This gem of a movie takes all the naivety of days gone by with the age old story of a bad man who thinks the world is changing for the worse and depravity rules. Blitzed into just 60 odd minutes this was obviously made as a B movie but is a world above anything it was made to run alongside. If this was remade today it would have to be a gruesome 18 cert affair probably filmed in the seedy parts of London and involve drugs and prostitutes ( Harry Brown springs to mind)but the way they get the message across without so much as a grain of smut is incredible. Absolutely fantastic piece of movie making and seems as relative today as it was when made over 50 years ago.
    8slapdab

    A glimpse of what we missed

    Harry H Corbett won acclaim as a stage actor early in his career but in 1962 he appeared on television for a 'one-off' Galton and Simpson Playhouse called 'The offer'. This was successful enough for Galton and Simpson to be asked to turn it into a series which they called Steptoe and Son. This was so popular that it ran for eight series ending in 1974.

    Most people will only know Harry H Corbett for his portrayal of Harold Steptoe in Steptoe and Son. The quality of these performances, especially the little monologues and character sketches that were often included in the beginning of some of the later episodes, give an insight into the potential he had which was never realised.

    Sadly, after 12 years as Harold Steptoe, Harry H Corbett was irredeemably typecast and found little serious dramatic work before his untimely death from a heart attack in 1982.

    In Cover Girl Killer he is almost unrecognisable and his (believable) character could not be much further from his later typecasting.

    This film is slightly clichéd but is worth seeing in its own right. However, I would advise anyone who has enjoyed Harry H Corbett in anything else to watch this if only to see what we missed of a potentially great dramatic career.
    michaelparle1

    Harry H Corbett is superb

    A wonderful gem of sleazy 1960s London with a brilliant performance from the wonderfully versatile Harry H Corbett in a very dark interesting turn as a Serial killer
    6trimmerb1234

    Firmly Basque country - a glimpse of stocking in olden days

    There are some surprisingly long well-informed reviews of this seemingly rather undistinguished 1959 British B. Those who might have seen it at that time are now all senior citizens. But for a few, perhaps a very few, such elderly gentlemen it evokes memories of their formative years like nothing else.

    If you had been a young person with an interest in photography you would have been aware of the publications safely tucked away on the top shelves of the newsagents shops - as appear in this film. Soho was then as now an exotic location well known for the fleshly pleasures including foreign foods. Indeed it was a basket of exotica quite unique in the entire UK. Oddly at the same time, it was the home of army surplus radio gear - all displayed on stalls outside the shops. It thus drew serious studious radio amateurs old and young to briefly share its busy notorious pavements with its more permanent and mostly female residents as well as passing rather furtive older gentlemen in raincoats and often bowler hats whose visit might only be slightly longer than that of the innocent old and young radio enthusiasts.

    By the standards on the 1950s, the above would be quite unsuitable for any kind of family publication or family conversation as it alludes to what was common knowledge but then a taboo topic in family contexts. Such were the dim and distant 1950s - made vivid again by this film whose makers clearly knew their market.

    Did I see it at the time? I'm not sure - it would have been at least an A possibly an X certificate. Yet Felicity Young seems oddly very familiar. Why was she so memorable? Not just because she was very good looking. I think because she was a classy ostensibly "nice" girl who did - remove her clothes, not all of course. In a world then firmly divided between nice girls who didn't and not nice girls who did, Felicity Young produced a thrilling confusion in a younger impressionable mind - apparently.

    It is a strange thing that less can be more. In such restricted times, very little could seem very much more.
    6JamesHitchcock

    Just because he's a psychopath doesn't mean he's stupid.

    Serial killer thrillers have become quite popular in Hollywood over recent years, especially since the success of "The Silence of the Lambs", but "Cover Girl Killer" is a rare British example of the genre from the late fifties. A maniac is targeting the models who have posed for the front cover of a men's magazine called "Wow!" The magazine's publisher and his girlfriend (herself a model) join forces with the police to help track down the killer.

    A film made on this theme twenty, or maybe even ten, years later, to say nothing of one on the subject today, would doubtless be ultra-violent with plenty of nudity, and possibly sex scenes as well. In 1959, however, they did things differently. Although it deals with murder, the film is reassuringly old-fashioned and traditional in the same way as an Agatha Christie mystery is reassuringly old-fashioned and traditional. The investigating detective is played as the typical Englishman from so many films around this period, tweedy, pipe-smoking and normally seen brewing himself a cup of tea. "Wow!" magazine is much tamer than the "Playboy" type of girlie mag, with no nudity or even toplessness; pictures of girls in bikinis is about as far as it gets. The girls themselves are all pretty, sweet and wholesome rather than raunchy or seductive. Even the publisher is not some Hugh Hefner or Bob Guccione figure but a mild-mannered Canadian archaeologist who has inherited the magazine from an eccentric uncle.

    Even the killer is a traditional figure, a deranged Jack the Ripper type who is on a mission to cleanse Britain of what he sees as a tide of filth and obscenity. (We never learn his true name, although he uses various false ones; in the cast list he is referred to simply as "The Man"). When we first see him he is wearing thick pebble glasses, a badly-fitting wig and a raincoat, making him look like the standard cartoon image of the Dirty Old Man. (Ironically, "You dirty old man!" was to become the catch-phrase of the actor who plays him, Harry H Corbett, when he later starred in the television comedy series "Steptoe and Son"). This image proves to be a disguise; the killer is rather more subtle and intelligent than the police had originally assumed. Just because he's a psychopath doesn't mean he's stupid.

    Corbett's portrayal of this obsessive maniac makes for the best contribution to the film. He started off as a serious actor, even starring in productions of Shakespeare, but was unlucky in two ways. He was unlucky in that he shared a name with Harry Corbett, the popular children's entertainer of "Sooty Bear" fame. Although he did not have a middle name, he was forced to add a bogus middle initial in an attempt to avoid confusion, not always successfully. (According to one, possibly apocryphal, story, this confusion was responsible for the Sooty Bear man being made an Officer of the British Empire, an honour which should have gone to his namesake). He was also unlucky in that the success of "Steptoe" led to his being typecast as a comic actor and made it impossible for him to re-establish himself in the sort of serious drama he preferred. In the later part of his career he was rarely offered parts in anything but comedies.

    As I said, the film has a very dated feel, yet it is skilfully made and succeeds in generating a certain amount of tension. When it turns up on television (as it occasionally does) it is worth watching, if only as an example of a very different style of film-making to anything we might be used to today. 6/10

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    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      In 1984, the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood paraphrased one of The Man's lines "Are we living in a land, where sex and horror are the new Gods?" for their song "Two Tribes".
    • Goofs
      Spencer Teakle manages to arrive at the stage door of the theatre where Felicity Young is being held captive after having left the police station just seconds before.
    • Quotes

      [Gloria is informed that she'll need to work all night and into the next morning]

      Gloria Starke: Ten o'clock? I shall be dead!

      [smash cut to her lying dead on the ground]

    • Connections
      Featured in Truly, Madly, Cheaply!: British B Movies (2008)

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • September 26, 1959 (United Kingdom)
    • Country of origin
      • United Kingdom
    • Language
      • English
    • Filming locations
      • Walton Studios, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, UK(studio: made at)
    • Production companies
      • Parroch
      • Jack Parsons Productions
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 1 minute
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.37 : 1

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