Columbia Noir #7: Made in Britain (UK Import) (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Mark Robson/Terence Fisher/Ken Hughes/Vernon Sewell/Sidney GilliatRelease Date(s)
1955-1957 (December 15, 2025)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Indicator/Powerhouse Films)- Film/Program Grade: See Below
- Video Grade: See Below
- Audio Grade: See Below
- Extras Grade: A-
- Overall Grade: A-
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region B-locked British Blu-ray import.]
For Indicator’s latest Region “B” Columbia Noir boxed set (#7), the focus is on Hollywood’s Columbia Pictures-co-financed British productions. Of the six films included, three—A Prize of Gold (1955), The Last Man to Hang (1956), and Wicked as They Come (1956)—make their worldwide Blu-ray debuts. The other three—Spin a Dark Web (1956), The Long Haul (1957), and Fortune Is a Woman (1957)—are new to the U.K. but previously released in the U.S. by VCI/Kit Parker Films. Those U.S. releases had no extra features, unlike Indicator’s boxed set, which also presents the films at a higher bit rate.
A Prize of Gold barely qualifies as film noir. Produced in color by Albert R. Broccoli and Irving Allen’s Warwick Films, it’s disjointed, alternately sentimental and comical, and not very credible. In postwar Occupied Berlin, Reichsbank gold bullion is found at the bottom of a river during a dredging operation. Master Sergeant Joe Lawrence (Richard Widmark), working under Air Provost Marshal Major Bracken (Alan Gifford), is among those working to transfer the gold in four shipments to England, Lawrence working alongside British MP Sergeant Roger Morris (George Cole).
After their Jeep is stolen, Lawrence encounters a group of inexplicably hidden German orphan children, looked after by Maria (Mai Zetterling). She’s trying to relocate the children to Brazil to start a new life there. (Why Brazil? Why not Germany?) Lawrence immediately falls head-over-heels with Maria, but financing for the kids has already been arranged by German racketeer Hans Fischer (Eric Pohlmann), who demands sexual favors from Maria in return. When Lawrence beats up Hans, that queers the deal for the kids, improbably motivating Lawrence to hijack the last shipment of bullion.
Lawrence partners with Roger, and together they build a team that includes semi-retired fence Alfie Stratton (Donald Wolfit), driver and Roger’s Uncle Dan (Joseph Tomelty), and cocky but experienced ex-RAF pilot Brian Hammell (Nigel Patrick), whom Lawrence doesn’t trust, with good reason.
Awkwardly structured and far-fetched, about half the film’s running time is spent setting up the romance between Lawrence and Maria, his compassion for the kids, and motivation for the disproportionately daring, high-stakes crime. His decision and plans for the heist come so abruptly and the heist is planned so haphazardly with so little forethought, it’s a wonder it nearly succeeds. What were Lawrence’s plans had it succeeded? Go AWOL and hide out in Brazil with Maria? How did Lawrence think he’d get out of the country undetected?
The romance is equally awkward, with Lawrence falling too deeply, too quickly to be believed, especially since she’s so resistant, worrying that he might screw up her deal with Hans, unseemly though it may be. Somebody on the film fell in love with Germany’s Messerschmitt KR175, a tiny, single-door, two-seater bubble car. Widmark drives all over Berlin in one, accompanied by comical music (by Malcolm Arnold) more appropriate to a Jerry Lewis movie.
Another big problem is that no one seemed to understand that a single gold bar typically weighs approximately 28 lbs. (12.5kg), yet crates of the stuff are moved about as if they were boxes of Kleenex. During the climax, one character does a runner with about six bars stuffed in his pockets and it barely slows him down. Carrying the equivalent of 12 bowling balls, you’d think he wouldn’t be able to do much more that waddle.
Problems aside, the film does boast especially interesting location photography of postwar Berlin, halfway between Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair and One, Two, Three, with many neighborhoods still reduced to rubble. To see all this in vivid color is a definite plus, though the picture also features many jarring, even appalling traveling matte shots that really should have been redone.
Released in 1.85:1 widescreen and Technicolor, the video transfer is variable. Much of it looks great, exhibiting a subtle film grain but also much detail and accurate color, yet other parts throughout are more blotchy, grainier, and (such as the final shot) show signs of damage. For instance, during the scene introducing Donald Wolfit, his hands and face are almost gray-green. The LPCM 1.0 mono audio is adequate and optional English subtitles (true of all six titles) are included.
Supplements consist of the following: an audio commentary with film historians Thirza Wakefield and Melanie Williams; a 109-minute BEHP Interview with Bill Lewthwaite, film editor; Golden Opportunity, a 14-minute interview with clapper loader (!) Geoff Glover; Stealing Hearts, a 15-minute video essay/interview with film historian Lies Lanckman; a trailer and image gallery.
A PRIZE OF GOLD (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): B-/A-/A-/A-
The Last Man to Hang (1956) is a very entertaining courtroom drama—again, hardly film noir—and clearly inspired by the great success of the 1953 London West End and subsequent Broadway production of Agatha Christie’s play Witness for the Prosecution. (But not Billy Wilder’s 1957 film, as that hadn’t been released yet.) The most compelling evidence for this is that The Last Man to Hang offers a “surprise ending” like Christie’s play, and that the barrister defending the accused is played by David Horne, who played Sir Wilfred in the West End production of Witness for the Prosecution. The movie also has a 10-minute jury deliberation sequence near the end that’s like a condensed version of 12 Angry Men (with Victor Maddern, of all people, in the Henry Fonda role). The film of that likewise wasn’t released for another year, and it’s unlikely that the British writers of The Last Man to Hang had seen the earlier Studio One live television version, which aired in 1954, so unlike Witness, the similarities there are probably coincidental.
Another oddity: The opening features actor (and future director) John Schlesinger playing a character with the highly unusual name of Dr. Goldfinger. Given that Ian Fleming wrote the novel Goldfinger in 1957 it’s not inconceivable Fleming saw The Last Man to Hang and consciously or unconsciously made a mental note about the name.
Nevertheless, the film works on its own terms. It’s neither a lavish big studio production nor a Sam Katzman-type cheap B-picture of the type co-financier Columbia churned out regularly during this period. It has no big stars, but a decent budget and a cast of good, established performers.
Housekeeper Mrs. Tucker (Freda Jackson) finds her longtime mistress, Lady Daphne Strood (Elizabeth Sellars) dead in her bed, apparently poisoned. Mrs. Tucker insists that Daphne’s music critic husband, Sir Roderick (Tom Conway), murdered her, and he suspiciously is at the airport, ready to leave the country, apparently with singer Elizabeth (Eunice Gayson). When confronted by police with news of his wife’s death, he exclaims, “I’ve killed her.”
Q.C. Antony Harcombe (David Horne) agrees to take the case. Sir Roderick, through flashbacks, talks about his unhappy marriage to the pathologically jealous and controlling Daphne, and that how, on the evening of her death, she lied to him claiming to be pregnant, attempted suicide, and that he tried to calm her to sleep with sedatives Elizabeth provided the stressed-out music critic.
The case goes to trial and, finally, to a jury that includes, besides Maddern, other familiar faces including Anthony Newley, Harold Goodwin, and Thomas Heathcote.
The movie’s modest aims of a Witness for the Prosecution-like courtroom thriller are largely achieved. It can’t hold a candle to Wilder’s film—one his best and most entertaining—but, on its own terms, The Last Man to Hang is 75 minutes of fun, and even a little meaty in its jury deliberation scenes, where the topic of capital punishment and the presumption of innocence are debated. Considering the film is as close as David Horne got to repeating his stage role in a movie of Witness for the Prosecution, he’s interesting to watch and compare his performance to Charles Laughton’s in Wilder’s film. Laughton is clearly superior but Horne, even working with a much-inferior screenplay, displays many of the same qualities, and Horne’s hairy ears impress in their own way. As with most British films of this period, the cast is peppered with lots of familiar actors, including future Miss Marple Joan Hickson, future Aunt Beru (of Star Wars fame) Shelagh Fraser and, uncredited, prolific character actor Charles Lloyd Pack. Director Terence Fisher would soon after become Hammer Films’ best-known director of Gothic horror films. His direction here is livelier than those tend to be with many more set-ups than was his norm.
For the record, Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen were the last men to be hanged in Great Britain, in 1964.
Presented in 1.85:1 widescreen (obviously per Columbia’s requirements), The Last Man to Hang’s video transfer is variable, the black-and-white image razor sharp some of the time, a little soft and blurry elsewhere, though Columbia’s ‘50s black-and-white movies tended to look too grainy or too soft or too inconsistent, as here. The mono audio, supported by optional English subtitles is adequate.
Supplements consist of an audio commentary by Barry Forshaw and Kim Newman; Film Fanfare No. 5, a five-minute Pathé newsreel excerpt of a young woman visiting the set of the film, which includes a few shots of director Fisher; The Guardian Lecture with Ivor Montagu from 1977, the screenwriter talking for 75 minutes; an image gallery and promotional materials.
THE LAST MAN TO HANG (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): B+/A-/A-/A
“Wait until Andrew Carnegie hears about you!”
Wicked as They Come (1956) is like a throwback to some pre-Code Joan Crawford potboiler and, indeed, is not dissimilar to Crawford’s later-career The Damned Don’t Cry (1950). It’s one of those stories about an impoverished woman clawing her way into wealth, chewing and spitting out various men like chewing gum along the way.
Here, Arlene Dahl stars as Katherine Allenborg, a poor Boston factory worker who enters a beauty contest, charming both the elderly father and son running the contest into fixing it, allowing her an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. En route to London she meets ad man Tim O’Bannion (Philip Carey), but she sets her sights higher, first with smitten photographer Larry Buckman (Michael Goodliffe), Kathy taking a powder after racking up 11,000 pounds on his department store credit account.
Blowing through her winnings, she lands a job at O’Bannion’s firm, seducing Stephen Collins (Herbert Marshall), the much older—and married—general manager, but when it becomes clear he’ll never leave his wife, Virginia (Faith Brook), to marry her, Kathy pivots to Collins’s boss, company president John Dowling (Ralph Truman), Virginia’s father.
Arlene Dahl isn’t bad if somewhat miscast, she better known for playing elegant, high society types, though she’s reasonably believable in the early, working-class scenes. She’s attractive but not particularly the Rhonda Fleming-esque, seductively beautiful type of this period.
The film is undistinguished; it plods along its overly-familiar course adequately but without any new twists to its worn-out material. The opening scenes are interesting for its English-imagined depiction of Americans. Kathy lives with her crude but caring stepfather, Frank (Sid James), and it’s amusing watching James, Patrick Allen, and other British actors attempting with varying degrees of success New York accents (this despite its Boston setting).
Another plus is Michael Goodliffe, an underrated actor here playing the most psychotic of Kathy’s lovers, he uncomfortably realistic as an alternately threatening and controlling, pathetically begging and needy character incapable of a normal male-female relationship. None of the other performers, while no worse than adequate, stand out. Herbert Marshall is good though obviously too old for the part, clearly intended for a man in his mid-50s. (Marshall was 65 and looked older.) Most films cleverly hid the actor’s limited mobility (he wore a prosthetic leg), but here Marshall clearly struggles with the excessive blocking of his character, and his limp is more noticeable than usual.
The picture tries to have its cake and eat it, too, with a final reel redemption of Dahl’s character, offering an explanation, if not quite an excuse, for her behavior, but in the end Wicked as They Come is much too ordinary to leave any impression.
In black-and-white 1.85:1 widescreen, Indicator’s Blu-ray of Wicked as They Come looks okay, exhibiting minor damage here and there, some reels looking to be in better shape than others. The LPCM 1.0 mono audio faring somewhat better.
Extras consist of a selected-scenes audio commentary by writer José Arroyo; The BEHP Interview with Maxwell Setton, a 90-minute interview with the producer; Soho (1943), a 12-minute silent amateur film by director Ken Hughes, “capturing life in London during the Second World War,” and which features an original musical score; a trailer and image gallery.
WICKED AS THEY COME (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): B-/B+/A-/A-
Spin a Dark Web (original British title: Soho Incident) breaks no new ground, but is a fairly compact, well-told if familiar yarn of a failed boxer naively drawn into the criminal underworld. Jim Bankley (Lee Petterson) is a Canadian Army veteran not making much progress as a London-based prizefighter when an old army buddy, literally Buddy (Robert Arden), working for Sicilian gangster Rico Francesi (Martin Benson), provides an introduction for work. Francesi isn’t in need of muscle at the moment, but his sister, Bella (Faith Domergue), obviously attracted to Jim, persuades Francesi to hire him.
Coincidentally, Jim is dating Betty Walker (Rona Anderson, wife of Gordon Jackson), whose brother, Bill (Peter Hammond) is also a fighter. When Francesi orders torpedo McLeod (Bernard Fox, in his film debut) to lay down the law after Bill fails to take a pre-arranged dive, McLeod loses his head and murders Bill right in front of his trainer-father, Tom Walker (Joss Ambler). McLeod takes a powder, but Francesi unwisely refuses to pay him off. Meanwhile, sultry Bella seduces Jim, he absurdly unaware that his new boss is indirectly responsible for Bill’s murder.
Directed by quality journeyman Vernon Sewell, Spin a Dark Web is cliché-crammed but taut, running a brisk 77 minutes. The film’s main attribute is its seedy Soho locations, fascinating to see in their mid-1950s glory. Since Lee Patterson and others in the cast weren’t exactly household names, Sewell (or his second-unit director) manage lots of “stolen” footage of Jim and others wandering crowded streets with passersby barely noticing the film camera, or not at all.
Lee Patterson (1929-2007), like his character, was a Canadian. He’s handsome but as an actor rather colorless, yet like busy Robert Arden, his accent got him steady work in British films needing an American or Canadian character, and in Hollywood productions shot there. His credits include The Good Die Young, Above Us the Waves, Jack the Ripper, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Chato’s Land, and Death With 3.
He gets second-billing to Faith Domergue, who made a big splash in Howard Hughes’s (with whom she had an affair) Vendetta and appeared opposite Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains in the excellent noir Where Danger Lives (both 1950). From there it was a slow downhill slide, Domergue under contract to Universal, appearing in Westerns and sci-fi films. During this period, she was loaned out to Columbia (for this It Came from Beneath the Sea) and shot three pictures in England, the others being The Atomic Man (aka Timeslip) and Man in the Shadow. She had an impressively busy 1955-56 but after that it was mostly TV guest shot work and roles in increasingly cheap genre films into the 1970s.
In her prime Domergue was an unusual, sloe-eyed beauty though not much of an actress, and by the early ‘60s, her days as a sultry glamour queen having passed (minus the old-time Hollywood magic, she was jarringly quite plain, even odd-looking) she was mostly riding on her former fame. In Spin a Dark Web, Domergue gives one of her better performances, playing a cold-blooded mercenary more cutthroat than her swaggering but conservative older brother.
In black-and-white and filmed for 1.66:1 widescreen, Indicator’s Blu-ray offers a good if inconsistent transfer, the image impressively razor-sharp at times, a little soft and grainy at others, par for the course with these titles. The LPCM 1.0 mono is fine, supported by optional English subtitles.
Extras consist of an audio commentary by Eloise Ross; The BEHP Interview with director Sewell from 1994, running 76 minutes (Sewell died in 2001 at age 97); A Test of Love (1937), a quaint informational film about the perils of V.D., directed by Sewell; an image gallery and U.S. trailer.
SPIN A DARK WEB (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): B+/A-/A-/A-
By a nose the best film in the set, Fortune Is a Woman (U.S. title: She Played with Fire) is a solid crime noir with a particularly good cast, a generally clever script by Frank Laudner and director Sidney Gilliat (from Winston Graham’s novel) and good direction. Indeed, it’s so good watching it again for this review I kept thinking that, under Alfred Hitchcock’s direction, it might have been one of his better films.
In an excellent, nuanced performance, Jack Hawkins stars as Oliver Bramwell, an insurance investigator for the firm of Abercrombie & Son. He’s sent to Lowis Manor to investigate a comparatively small fire. Bramwell is surprised to learn the lord of the manor, Tracey Morton (Dennis Price) like him served in Burma during the war, but the even bigger surprise is that his wife is Sarah (Arlene Dahl again), Bramwell’s former lover five years earlier when they met in Hong Kong until she abruptly disappeared.
Bramwell becomes friendly with the couple but thinks nothing of it until, months later, investigating an insurance claim by a movie company over a supposedly ailing, clearly arrogant actor (Christopher Lee, in an amusing performance), Bramwell stumbles upon a valuable painting supposedly destroyed in the fire at Lowis Manor. Further investigation suggests Sarah sold the painting in a false insurance claim.
Suspecting widespread fraud, Bramwell sneaks into Lowis Manor late one night, only to find Tracey Morton dead, and a fire deliberately set in the basement—lit candles in barrels of wood shavings. Bramwell beats a hasty retreat as the manor burns to the ground, but later learns that the woman who sold the paintings wasn’t Sarah after all. Without telling his father and son bosses (real-life father and son Malcolm and Geoffrey Keen) any of this, he rekindles his relationship with Sarah, she awarded a 30,000-pound settlement, and quickly marry. But then some mysterious figure enters the picture attempting to blackmail them.
The complex plot requires attentive viewing, but audiences are rewarded with an intriguingly Byzantine, unpredictable plot working its way to a reasonably satisfying conclusion. Is Tracey still alive? Is Sarah manipulating lovestruck Bramwell? Who is blackmailer Mr. Jerome (Bernard Miles) working for?
Other than a few minor missteps—English actor John Phillips affects a ludicrous American accent in several scenes—Fortune Is a Woman is stylishly directed, genuinely moody and suspenseful at times, with impressively staged scenes, particularly Bramwell creepy about Lowis Manor as the fire in the basement soon gets wildly out of control. Holding it all together is Jack Hawkins’s marvelous acting, he so good at playing stolid types whose confidence and begins to crack under pressure, notably in The Cruel Sea. Bramwell is a man who clearly enjoys his job as an investigator and is very good at it, too, with strong instinctive skill. He’s so vehemently professional, when he’s forced to lie to his bosses—one very good scene has him feigning a sprained ankle with Geoffrey Keen, also excellent—his ethical violations personally torture him.
Arlene Dahl is far better cast here than in Wicked as They Come the previous year, and late-in-the-story arrivals Bernard Miles and Michael Goodliffe (as a police inspector) add much additional yet varied pressure to the plot. The cinematography by Gerald Gibbs is noteworthy (though some trick shots are quite grainy), and William Alwyn’s musical score is genuinely eerie at times. All told, a very good picture.
Indicator’s Blu-ray of the black-and-white, 1.66:1 widescreen film is, like Spin a Dark Web, alternately impressively sharp most of the time, simultaneously grainy and soft at other times, but certainly presentable. Likewise, the LPCM 1.0 mono, with its optional English subtitles. Two version of the film are offered; they have identical running times and apparently the only difference are the opening titles.
Supplements consist of an audio commentary with film historians Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby; The BEHP Interview with Anthony Mendelson, the film’s costume designer, in a 1993 piece running 95 minutes; The Little Ship, a 1952 film running 12 minutes narrated by Jack Hawkins; and an image gallery.
FORTUNE IS A WOMAN (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): A-/A-/A-/A-
The Long Haul is an okay crime picture centered around Britain’s trucking industry, coincidentally produced at the same time as Cy Endfield’s much-superior Hell Drivers. Discharged from where he’s stationed in Germany, U.S. Army NCO Harry Miller (Victor Mature) returns to England and his British wife, Connie (Gene Anderson), and their young son. He’s anxious to move everyone to California, where a cannery job awaits, but she for no clear reason is determined to keep the family in England, specifically her hometown of Liverpool.
He gets a trucking job there but soon it’s clear fellow driver Casey (Liam Redmond) and others are in league with a gang of freight hijackers led by gangster Joe Easy (Patrick Allen, made up to look 20 years older than he was). Harry more or less gets swallowed up into this world when he becomes involved with Joe’s girl, sultry, unhappy Lynn (Diana Dors), damaging his relationship with Connie in the process.
There’s nothing original here: while it doesn’t steal from Hell Drivers—that film premiered in July 1957, The Long Haul two months later, in August—its last third does seem heavily influenced by the classic French film The Wages of Fear (1953), here with Mature, Dors, and Allen precariously navigating a truck loaded with stolen furs off-road through the Scottish Highlands. What makes The Long Haul watchable is Mature and, like Hell Drivers, its depiction of the trucking industry in late-‘50s Britain. (For most of the picture, Mature drives a beguiling vehicle called an “Octopus” because of its eight wheels.)
Mature famously once said, "I’m not an actor—and I’ve got 64 films to prove it!” Yet he had a certain, unusual quality in his best films, a kind of rugged, working-class authenticity that compensated for his slight woodenness, sometimes performing in offbeat ways better actors couldn’t get away with. He’s well cast here, believable as a truck driver simply trying to earn money, with troubles at home with his inflexible, neurotic wife. Mature is good in both the trucking and domestic life scenes, playing the kind of very ‘50s male provider who either keeps his emotions in check or who speaks with sudden frankness, as if wanting to get to the bottom of things and solve problems as quickly as possible.
The film has the usual familiar British actors one finds in these ‘50s titles. Sam Kydd as a taxi driver, Edward Judd—Gene Anderson’s husband at the time—in an uncredited small role as a trucker, and though he’s uncredited and not listed even on the Internet Movie Database, William Sylvester, later of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame.
Misleadingly advertised as “GrandVision” in Japan and perhaps elsewhere, suggesting a VistaVision-type process, The Long Haul was filmed in ordinary 35mm for 1.85:1 projection, but the video transfer of this black-and-white film is impressively sharp and cleaner overall than the three previous titles. The LPCM 1.0 mono is also very good and, like the others, supported by optional English subtitles.
Supplements consist of an audio commentary by film historians Will Fowler and Vic Pratt; In for the Long Haul, a 10-minute interview with third assistant director Ted Wallis and focus puller (!) Alec Burridge from 2010; The Long Night Haul, a 1956 two-reeler from the British Transport System, about the British Road Service’s general haulage truck division; and an image gallery.
THE LONG HAUL (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): B/A/A/A-
This set is limited to 6,000 units. Regrettably, The Digital Bits received check discs only, and did not receive the 120-page booklet accompanying the set. Nevertheless, it’s still highly recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV