Soho Conspiracy

Not the crime film it sounds like, but an ultra-cheap E.J.Fancey quickie cobbled together around footage of Four Great Stars of the Italian Opera recycled from an Italian film made a couple of years earlier called 'Follie per l'Opera'.

There's a long tradition of movies cannibalising footage from foreign films bought for a song, but the contrast is particularly marked here by the cheap and tinny film built around the footage of Beniamino Gigli, Tito Gobbi (whose 'English' dialogue is obviously dubbed), Gino Bechi and Tito Schipa billed before the regular cast (which includes an uncharacteristically benign Peter Gawthorne as an Irish priest and Annette Simmonds as a sleek blonde femme fatale), and the thoroughly misleading title promising something grittier.

This is quite possibly the worst example of British cinema - that could ever hope to be taken seriously - that I have ever watched. It reminded me of one of those Saturday's in the kitchen when your mum gave you free run to use any ingredients you could find to put into a cake mixture and then see what the oven supplied an hour later... Well, this film is a celluloid equivalent. There is a plot - not that it matters in any way: a lawyer is trying to trick a restaurant owner out of his property so he can demolish it and build a big new development; meantime these shenanigans almost derail (we live in hope) a charity show that features some opera singers. To add to the shambolic look of the film, director Cecil H. Williamson - has "borrowed" some footage of serious singing talent Tito Gobbi and Maria Caniglia, who were both fairly accomplished stars, and folded it into the storyline. Their contributions - including some pretty shocking attempts at dubbing - were incorporated into the sloppily constructed drivel in such a fashion as to render them almost ridiculous - though no more so than much of the rest of this poor effort at comedy.

I think that there should be a desperate category for films produced by E J Fancey.They are well below the level of B pictures of the period.The question is how did he get away with it so long.Didn't the exhibitors realise that they were getting yesterday's leftovers.The screenplay such as it is is totally ridiculous.The story is about trying to put on a concert to raise money to save a restaurant closing.Judging by the goings on in the restaurant the customers would be better off if it closed.There are a lot of comedy routines thrown in for no better reason than to pad up the film,in between the musical numbers,also used to pad out the film.