Shoot to Kill

Recently, I watched Shoot to Kill at a private screening after it showed up on Ebay in a 16mm print. The print was a dupe print from a very deteriorated master (either 16 or 35). The first two reels suffered from very heavy emulsion deterioration, creating what looked like white blobs on the right and left side of the frame. In addition, the deterioration in the second reel affected the soundtrack, making all the dialogue on that reel nearly unintelligible. Under these circumstances, I cannot give Shoot to Kill a rating. However, I will relay my thoughts on this rare film.

Shoot To Kill is a low-budget spy movie. It begins with reporter Mike Roberts (Dermot Walsh) being sent to Venice to cover a film festival. At the airport he makes nice with an actress who bares him a grudge. They make up, and all is well until their airplane crashes in stock footage that, I believe, was taken from Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent.

While recovering, the actress finds a blueprint and is immediately accosted by a foreign gentleman who says the blueprint is his. After exchanging words with Mike Roberts, the matter is settled. However, a piece of the blueprint had gotten torn and is found by Roberts later. Curious, Roberts ditches his film festival assignment and travels to Geneva to investigate.

What follows is a not overly thrilling espionage tale involving: plans for a new type of rocket, a scientist, his kidnapped daughter, and MI-5 using the reporter to do its dirty work for them. Along the way, Mike Roberts finds time to romance another correspondent (Joy Webster).

Shoot to Kill is an hour-long British B-Movie. It does not stand out in any way. The storytelling is awkward with none of the film festival/plane crash plot ever mentioned after the setting switches to Geneva. The actress character who seems at the beginning to be the film's leading lady disappears completely after the interaction with the foreign spy. The film's setting is Geneva, but I would guess that only a few pickup shots were filmed there, with most of the shooting being done in merry old England. The quick pace of the film shoot is shown by a lack of insert shots that would have clarified some details that are merely talked about in the dialogue. Finally, a viewer knows he is in trouble when the best scene in the movie (the airplane crash) is stock footage, even if admittedly the stock footage was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Shoot to Kill is remembered only because it was the feature film debut for both actress Lynn Redgrave and director Michael Winner. I am not certain who Lynn Redgrave played in the film. My guess is that she plays one of the airplane crash survivors. As for Michael Winner, he is a controversial figure. I have found some of his films well done (The Mechanic and Death Wish) and some of his other films entertaining as guilty pleasures (The Sentinel and Death Wish II and III). However, whatever flare for action Winner showed in the Charles Bronson films must have developed later.

I only sat through the lousy picture quality and the hard to hear (sometimes impossible to hear) dialogue because of the rarity of Shoot to Kill. While the film itself was not one of the worst I have ever seen, I kept thinking that if the Fates had blessed me to watch a film thought lost, why couldn't the film have been the complete Magnificent Ambersons or F. W. Murnau's The Four Devils, or the infamous Convention City.

According to its director, this film is lost.

Presumably it was never bought for television and so disappeared when Border Film Productions stopped making films sometime in the 70s.

Michael Winner (yes, that one) claimed on a recent BBC4 documentary that his second opus, a musical called "Climb Up The Wall", was also lost. Intriguingly, a review on this very site by one Sylvester (the cat?) claims "The Clock Strikes Eight" as Winner's second film. It's described as "a very routine murder mystery", but it's hard to tell whether he's actually seen it. Silly cat.

In "Truly Madly Cheaply: British B Movies", Matthew Sweet made the point that while a lot of British black and white B films are cráp (I agree) they offer perhaps a more realistic representation of Britain in the 50s/ early 60s than many big budget films did. In mentioning the important part these films played in our parent's and grandparent's cinema experience (a regular, fleapit experience rather than some rare multiplex treat) Sweet neglected to explore the impact these films had when shown as afternoon matinees in the 80s. Quite often, with the BBC showing the Test card, in the gap between "Pebble Mill" and "Jackanory" - and BBC2/ Channel 4 either broadcasting schools TV or nothing at all - these British B films were the only things on in the afternoon. Imagine that, kids! And what a bizarre contrast 50s Britain, with its pipe smoking police detectives and cut glass speech, formed with life in Thatcher's Britain – and more especially for single mums, the unemployed or school kids bunking off school, who had nothing better to do with their afternoons than watch these strange, black and white representations of a lost world.

I remember seeing this film at Saturday morning children's matinee in the early 1960s. My friends who I went with were intrigued at seeing Dermot Walsh in modern day dress, when they had been used to seeing him in a chain mail vest and medieval tights, carrying a broadsword in the both successful and popular television series: "Richard the Lionheart".

I am disappointed with it being a "lost film" as I would love to see it again.

If it is of any help to film historians and researchers, I saw the film at the Palace Cinema in James Street at Arbroath, in Scotland. Unfortunately, this cinema was turned into a full-time bingo house in 1984 and was finally closed in 1991, then demolished in 1992. Altruistically, a Shelter for the Homeless was built on its site.

There are no cinemas in Arbroath now. I think the nearest one is in Carnoustie, 9 miles away.