69 years ago today  that would be 30th April  1951, Richard Todd, famous film actor, opened his curtains that morning to prepare for the first day of filming on Walt Disney’s superb film ‘The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie men at Denham Film Studios just a short distance form his home in Pinckneys Green, close to Maidenhead.

As with all of Walt Disney’s films much preparation work had been gone into to ensure a minimum of delay in filming BUT on this day of all days, the weather caught them out.  Richard peered out of the window to see a covering of quite deep snow.

This was not something that the Walt Disney Producers had bargained for – but they did some Studio work and a few days later were able to film in Burnham Beeches – although it was still quite cold as Richard remembered in his Autobiography ‘ Caught in the Act’ – very good it is too and well worth a read as is the follow up ‘In Camera’ which deals with his film years after Robin Hood.

I try to post this snippet each year on this date

The Seekers is a 1954 film in beautiful Technicolor starring Jack Hawkins and Glynis Johns – and directed by one of my favourites Ken Annakin.

This is a real adventure film that could and should have been so much better than it was. Ken Annakin said in his Autobiography that the film was ‘not his finest hour’. He got on well with Glynis Johns who he had worked with before and he liked Jack Hawkins but felt that he was wrongly cast – as ‘he was too old and too well fed for the part’

In my view he was right on this. With a different leading man this could have been really good.

Laya Raki was cast as a Maori and is filmed swimming in a lake devoid of clothing – which nowadays would not have raised an eyebrow but then it did.

Opera singer Inia Te Wiata was also cast – he seemed to be on British Television quite a bit I remember throught the fifties.

Kenneth Williams played a young soldier and was quite good in this straight acting role.

Special mention for the brilliant Cinematography – in glorious Technicolor by Geoffrey Unsworth , shot on location in New Zealand , Whakatane, Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand and Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England, UK . Atmospheric and evocative score from William Alwyn and musical conductor as usual Muir Matheson .

The film titled ¨The Seekers¨ or ¨Land of fury¨ was professionally directed by Ken Annakin, containing some quite exciting moments . Ken Annakin had quite a diverse early career, including as a trainee income tax inspector in Hull. He got into film making during the War – His feature film debut, Holiday Camp (1947), was a comedy drama about a Cockney family on holiday in an English summer. It was made for the Rank Organisation and was a quite successful – I loved it – and it spawned three sequels, all of which he directed. 

His big break came when he was chosen to direct ‘The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men’ for Walt Disney at Denham Film Studios – a film which, up to that time was the most expensive film ever made here.

Ken was well up to the task and the film did very well at the Box Office on a Worldwide scale. A wonderful film that was and is !!!

Above – Jack Hawkins

Jack Hawkins and Noel Purcell

Noel Purcell ABOVE

An Irish Actor who was around quite a bit throughout the Fifties and after. One thing that has come to mind whilst writing this article is that I realised that Noel must have got used to long distance travel in his film years – first he was in Fiji in 1949 to film The Blue Lagoon – a mega trip in those days – then to Tauranga in New Zealand for this one – and a few years later in 1962 he was in Tahiti for a few months with Mutiny of the Bounty – Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.

He certainly chose some wonderful locations – or they were chosen for him I should say.

Laya Raki ABOVE was a German born former model who won a leading role in The Seekers. Not too long after this she married Americal actor Ron Randell and they had a long and very happy marriage.

She was not someone who missed a trick when it came to publicity though and I love this story about her :

The Seekers 1954

Lex Barker made only five Tarzan films but he is identified with this role so much so that when Tarzan films are mentioned his name comes up straight away – similarly when we mention the name Lex Barker – people immediately say ‘Tarzan’

Here he is with his family in 1948 – His son Zan Barker, born in Los Angeles, CA, March 25, 1947 to Alexander “Lex” Barker and Constance Thurlow-Adams, passed away peacefully at his home in Marla Bay, Lake Tahoe, NV on October 2, 2012.

Zan had always been very proud of his father and some of his earliest memories are watching his Dad on the RKO set filming some, if not all, of the Tarzan films there.

It also appears that Zan’s older sister Lynn Thurlow Barker died in 2010

Lex Barker’s wife in the photograph above – in fact his first wife – was Constanze Thurlow

27 June 1942 – 2 November 1950) (divorced) (2 children)

She was a daughter of Leon Rhodes Thurlow, a vice president of the Decorated Metal Manufacturing Company. They had one daughter, Lynn Thurlow Barker (April 11, 1943 – 2010) and a son, Alexander “Zan” Crichlow Barker III (March 25, 1947 – October 2, 2012).

When they were first in Hollywood Lex Barker lived in large estate on Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, with his first wife, Constanze Thurlow (Connie). His neighbour at the time was none other than Errol Flynn

Constance Thurlow then married her second husband, John Lawrence Adams, a descendant of John Quincy Adams in 1952 and they remained married for quite a few years but she sadly died in 1975 at the age of 57 – not too long after her first husband Lex Barker

Lex Barker as Tarzan BELOW – my own favourite of his Five Tarzan films and his first in the role – Tarzan’s Magic Fountain

‘Zan’ Barker BELOW

Zan Barker, born in Los Angeles, CA, March 25, 1947 to Alexander “Lex” Barker and Constance Thurlow-Adams, passed away peacefully at his home in Marla Bay, Lake Tahoe, NV on October 2, 2012.

He is survived by his brother, Christopher; his sister, Gaye; nephews Michael, Daniel, Justin; and nieces Laura and Clarissa. He was preceded in death by his parents and his sister, Lynn.

Zan lead a remarkable life. As a child he spent much of his time on movie sets with his father, who played “Tarzan” produced by Sol Lesser at RKO Productions in Los Angeles from 1949 to 1953. His father went on to produce over 60 films in both the US and Europe. Zan was very proud of his father and shared stories of him and his travels around the world. One of his fondest memories was watching his father lead the 1952 Rose Bowl Parade on a large African elephant.

What an influential man he was in the British Film Industry in fact no other person is associated more with the era of British Film making just before and after the War than he was. He was the Head of Ealing Studios and later took charge of MGM British Productions – a most prestigious job. He had seen success and disappointment over his period at the heart of British Films.

Michael Balcon at Home Her bought this Farm in Sussex on the Kent border in 1946 at Upper Parrock. He spends the week in a suite high up in a London Hotel and returns to his home at the weekend.

Here he is with his son, Jonathan

Michael Balcon and family enjoying the view on a Summer evening

Michael Balcon with his Daughter Jill Balcon – with whom he later had a poor relationship because of the man she decided to marry.

Mrs Balcon at Home – formerly Aileen Leatherman – who comes from a well-known Johannesburg family. She was awarded and MBE for her work in the Red Cross during the War – not long ended when this picture was taken

Michael Balcon at Home with his family

Sunday afternoon relaxing ABOVE

ABOVE – Aileen is in charge of all farming matters

ABOVE – Otto and Gretel long haired dachshunds known in the household as ‘the two sausages’

Michael Balcon at Home in his library

Michael Balcon seeking advice of farming matters

Michael Balcon ABOVE – He says that he is posing trying to look intelligent about the corn, but as he admits all he knows about this field is that it was badly damaged in the 1946 harvest

Michael Balcon loved his home here and he died here in 1977, his 15th-century house set on a Sussex hilltop near the Kent border. He and his wife had lived there since the Second World War. He was cremated and his ashes buried there

BELOW – A Much Later interview with his Daughter Jill Balcon

When she wed the future poet laureate C Day-Lewis her parents disowned her, wary of his reputation as a womaniser. The actress has rarely talked about her marriage, but as a new biography of her husband is published, she tells of their love, their children Daniel and Tamasin, and the hurt she still suffers

Jill Balcon, clear-sighted and with an actor’s eye for the telling detail, is a thrilling repository of stories about a world that now only exists among the pages of  biographies. To her, WH Auden is better known as Wystan, Vaughan Williams as Ralph.

Jill Balcon rarley talked about her past for a long time. The last biography of her husband, poet laureate C Day-Lewis, appeared in 1980, eight years after his death from cancer at the age of 68. It was written by his son, Sean (by Day-Lewis’s first wife, Mary), and it caused his widow great pain (mistresses were alluded to and the poetry all but ignored). She vowed, thereafter, to keep her silence, though she and Cecil, somewhat to her discomfort, would occasionally appear in biographies of other people, those of Cecil’s lovers, mostly.

Now, though, she has helped another biographer, Peter Stanford, to write her husband’s life. ‘I’m very two-faced,’ she says, with a short laugh. ‘I love reading biographies.’ And what does she make of this one? It is good, meticulous and pays proper attention to the poems, which she longs for people to rediscover (difficult to believe now how admired Day-Lewis once was; in 2007, he is ignored, not even honoured in Poet’s Corner).

She fears it will again be his private life that is most picked over and she is right. Serialised in another Sunday newspaper, the headline is a gruesome: ‘The Laureate of Lust’. Oh, well. I suppose we still expect only two things of our poets: that they be poor, and that they have complicated sex lives.

In any case, these things are relative. Day-Lewis’s private life was difficult but only by the standards of the day; he would barely make the cover of Heat now. Stanford suggests that Day-Lewis had two illegitimate sons in addition to the four children he had in marriage (two sons by Mary, the daughter of his old school-teacher, whom he married in 1928, and then, by Jill, Tamasin, the famous food writer, and Daniel, the even more famous actor), but they were

Stanford also details the poet’s already well-known relationship with novelist Rosamond Lehman, with whom Day-Lewis set up home in London while still married to Mary. After marriage to Balcon in 1951, there were more infidelities of the heart – we’ll come back to the most serious of these – but some may have been unconsummated (he was close to the young AS Byatt, but Stanford doubts that they slept together).

It is not, with Day-Lewis, a numbers game: it was his timing that was scandalous. Liaisons would happen when his children were small, their mothers tired and distracted. Or, paralysed by indecision – Lehman called it his ‘aspen hesitation’ – he would try desperately to keep two women content and end up hurting both of them horribly.

Jill Balcon met Cecil Day-Lewis in 1948, in a studio for the BBC’s Time for Verse. She had recently made her screen debut as Madeline Bray in an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. She thought Day-Lewis had not noticed her – he was, after all, 21 years her senior – but he had. How could he not? The only daughter of Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, Balcon was magnificent. ‘She looked like the sort of woman you only see on a Greek vase,’ says her friend Natasha Spender.

Later that year, after only a handful of meetings, they fell in love and Day-Lewis left both his wife of 21 years, Mary, and his lover of nine, Rosamond Lehman (the latter was furious – her sense of betrayal at what she regarded as an ‘infatuation’ was so deep it drove her half mad; she never really recovered). It was not the easiest start to a relationship: financially, Cecil was hard-pressed – he still had his children to keep – and Lehman was vilifying him to anyone who would listen. Plus, there was a divorce to be organised, a sordid business in those days. Then there was Jill’s father, who was implacably opposed to the relationship.

‘We started living together,’ says Balcon. ‘For a long time, we thought we’d never be able to marry. My father, who saw everything in black and white, was tremendously hostile. “There’s no reason why he’ll ever get a divorce,” he said. “What will she [Mary] gain?” Cecil was an older man, he was poor, and the idea that I should be working! My father thought Cecil was degrading me. The people who worked for him at Ealing, their private lives were in turmoil. But when it came to the hearth: the Jewish patriarch, the elder daughter who was rebellious … the fact that for one night I appeared on the front of the Evening Standard as co-respondent in a divorce was so shocking for him. He wanted some rich industrialist [for me], something I would have hated. He wanted to direct my life. When the war started, I was called up. He couldn’t control that. I’ve often thought that no matter how ghastly it [the Blitz] was – some things we went through were very frightening – at least it enabled me to get away.’

When she and Cecil were married, her father attended neither the wedding, nor the reception upstairs at the Ivy. ‘I still mind about that,’ she says, softly. ‘He was a powerful man. My mother met me in secret. We used to sit in her car in Hyde Park.’

Things went from bad to worse. After Tamasin was born, neither of Jill’s parents came near her: ‘No flowers, no message, no mother at the hospital.’ Her father took it as a deliberate slight that, when Day-Lewis placed a birth announcement in the Times, he did not put the words ‘nee Balcon’ after Jill’s name. Years later, they did not even come to Cecil’s funeral.

Still, she does not regret any of it. How could she? ‘Cecil was dazzling. Absolutely mesmeric. He had colossal magnetism. He was beautiful to look at and tremendously funny. So I was prepared to go through any kind of hell. I’ve got his letters and I discovered after he died that he’d kept mine. I don’t know if I have the courage to burn them; I think I’ll ask my son to do it.’

She spent the early days of their relationship feeling an odd combination of incredulity and anxiety. She had married her ‘hero’, a man she’d admired since 1937 when Day-Lewis judged the verse-speaking competition at her school, Roedean, but she was troubled by the circumstances of their meeting – Day-Lewis was emotionally exhausted by the years of shuttling between placid Mary and clingy Rosamond – and worried about money. ‘In those days, alimony was a third of your income.’ In August 1951, invited to join Stephen and Natasha Spender for a holiday on Lake Garda, she and Cecil had to sell two silver coffee pots, a present, in order to pay their fare.

Was she anxious about being a step-mother, too? ‘Of course. But they [Nicholas and Sean] were very nice to me. They couldn’t have been nicer. I think Sean may now feel resentful on behalf of his mother, who was a very good woman, utterly so. But she preferred women, as you probably read; the boys knew it, and Cecil knew it.’

She and Day-Lewis bought a house in Greenwich and tried to get on with life. They shared a love of poetry, their leftist politics (Day-Lewis was an ex-communist) and a sense of humour. But he had his dark side. ‘I’ve lived among writers and poets all my life and nothing is simple. They do tend to be melancholy. He was very often very depressed. Very low and full of guilt. But the thing that was wonderful was when he was composing – then he was happy. To be in another room, to hear him tapping and then for him to say, “This is what I’ve done.” It was so exciting. Like being in the sun. But I was also pitched into a world of older people of whom I was quite nervous.’

Gossip, mostly perpetrated by Lehman, didn’t help. When she was writing Lehman’s biography, Selina Hastings took Balcon to lunch. ‘She told me she thought she was going to be giving lunch to the Witch of Endor. She’d heard all about me from Rosamond.’ Balcon thinks now that perhaps she was naive. ‘Knowing his history [the tangled web with Rosamond], I thought he wouldn’t want to get involved with other people. I like attractive people; not just sexually attractive, but attractive. But if you do, other people are going to find them so, too.’

Balcon did not find out about her husband’s affair with her friend Elizabeth Jane Howard until after it was over, but it hurts her still. In 1954, Chatto & Windus, where Day-Lewis worked part-time as a reader, employed Howard, an actress turned acclaimed novelist, as an assistant. She and Balcon had known each other since their days at the BBC during the war. Howard was famously beautiful and, one night while Balcon was away – she had gone to a party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Bristol Old Vic – Howard and Day-Lewis went to Dedham Vale on the Essex border to pay homage to John Constable (Day-Lewis recorded this in a poem, ‘Dedham Vale, Easter 1954’). ‘I tried, but I didn’t have the strength to resist him,’ Howard tells Peter Stanford. ‘I would defy any woman to resist him.’

Their affair lasted three months. It was Howard’s guilt that prompted her to finish it, a decision she claims dented her lover’s ego and made him angry and abusive. In her 2002 memoir Slipstream, Howard describes her betrayal of her friend as ‘one of the worst things I ever did’. Tamasin Day-Lewis, her god-daughter, was only a baby at the time. ‘It still haunts me,’ says Balcon, closing her eyes. ‘It comes back and hits me, often at night. I’m so appalled, even all these years on. I think: how could they? I’ve not gone off with my best girlfriend’s men. Ever. When she first told me that it was her who stopped it, that he didn’t want to, well, that was even worse, in a way. I don’t know if it’s the truth because I can’t ask him. It’s terribly painful because we were close friends from being teenagers.’

Balcon looks drained as she tells me this, which makes it even more extraordinary to me that her husband later died in the Hertfordshire house, Lemmons, owned by Howard and her then husband, Kingsley Amis. Balcon took the decision to move the dying Cecil there because it was near Elstree, where she was filming, and because a ground-floor bedroom, complete with nurse, was available (Howard’s mother, Kit, was also ill). But even so …

‘It was a practical arrangement,’ she says. ‘I could be at his bedside in 15 minutes from the studio.’ But why did Howard even dare to suggest it? ‘Part of it was guilt. She saw the state he was in, and … she felt guilt. She must have.’ Yet their friendship continued. They had lunch only last year. ‘Yes. She was Tamasin’s godmother. She had so many lovers, you see. The whole lot. She was so beautiful and charming and gifted and amusing, and he [Cecil] liked people to write good books, which I certainly couldn’t. She told Peter [Stanford] that he’d been in love with her for ages. I find that unbearable because it was not long after we’d struggled to get married.’ She hasn’t read Slipstream and never will.

Balcon was absolutely stricken at Cecil’s death, a widow at just 47. Daniel was still at school, Tamasin was about to take up a place at Cambridge. ‘Our doctor said, “You must never take away hope from a patient”, so he wouldn’t let me discuss what was happening with Cecil. That wouldn’t happen now and it was a terrible burden. I was desperate. I used to take the car down to Deptford Creek and just shriek! I didn’t know what I was going to do for these children. All widows worry about money whether they’re well off or not and I wasn’t. I knew we couldn’t go on living in our lovely house. I mind terribly that he never saw the children growing up. They were at their most tortured and teenage, a terrible time to lose a parent. I don’t think I was at all good with them. I was probably selfish in my own grief.’

What effect did his death have on them? ‘Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Tamasin’s face got smashed by a train door, Daniel took some migraine tablets that had a very bad effect on him and the school doctor put him in some hospital down in Portsmouth. But these things happen. I feel sorrier for women who’ve been overprotected by their men – you know, who’ve never written a cheque. That’s cruel. I’d written plenty.’

We go into the kitchen for lunch, passing a teenage self-portrait by Daniel – cheekbones like daggers! – and the cartoon Ronald Searle gave her as a wedding present. We eat at a table and chairs that Daniel made for her years ago. Stuck to a counter is a poster for his 1988 film Stars and Bars; by it is a pile of Tamasin’s cookery books. When I tell her that Tamasin’s recipe for lemon risotto is the world’s best, she lights up. But she’s not some sentimental granny.

What I like about Balcon is this: unlike lots of women her age, with aching bones and a too-long widowhood behind them, she has not given up. She’s still present. She’s still interested. We talk – about being single and how vile Couple World can be – and the years between us fall away. And whatever happens to her husband’s poems, however little or much they are read, they are a comfort to her. In this sense, she is luckier than most widows – he’s still around. ‘It sounds awful, but I’m the keeper of the flame. But I grieve when his name isn’t mentioned.’

There are consolations. ‘Daniel [who lives in Ireland with his wife Rebecca Miller, daughter of the playwright, Arthur] was asked to do a village memorial for people who fled the Great Hunger, and chose to read from The Whispering Roots [Cecil’s last collection]. He asked my advice, which normally I wouldn’t presume to give him. So, yes, we are lucky.’ In spite of herself, she smiles.

Michael Balcon at Hom

The colour pictures of the day in the early fifties, were always very bright and equally glossy almost reflecting the Technicolor Films of that era, which had colour in my view unsurpassed

Errol Flynn with an unknown Indian in Rocky Mountain ABOVE

Although this is a great colour shot, the film was actually released in Black and White – it starred Errol Flynn and his wife Patrice Wymore – I believe he met her whilst working together on this film

It is possible to get hold of a colorised DVD of this one I am led to believe.

The Adventurers with Dennis Price filmed in South Africa – again this film was released in Black and White – and when you look at this wonderful colour picture above, it makes you wonder just why that was. It seemed to be in those days, that there were tight budgets and making a film in Technicolor was an expensive process – but surely it would have been worth it. After all King Solomons Mines was released at a similar time, filmed in Africa in Technicolor – and that film did very well indeed at the Box Office – and looked good.

Mind you another British film in Africa a couple of years before was ‘Diamond City’ again released in Black and White – and again that did not do well at all and lost money – as I expect this one did.

Dennis Price meeting local children in South Africa.

There was superb location work by veteran cameraman Ossie Morris; combining the inhospitable terrain – oppressively hot – with the squabbling amongst a small, ill-matched group searching for treasure.

Much of the South African filming was done in and around the Drakensberg Mountains

ABOVE – The Drakensberg Mountains

I did see The Adventurers described as a ‘Western set in South Africa’ but this is not a film that I have seen so can’t really comment on that – however a film made a decade of more later was given a similar tag – and that one was ‘The Hellions’ filmed in the country but not in this area.

I have always imagined that the Queen would be a big film fan and here she – when she was still Princess Elizabeth – is visiting the Studios – in this case Ealing Studios – to see something of the making of ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ which was released here in early April of 1947 – so it would be fair to say that this picture was taken during the summer of 1946 – not long after the War.

Here is Princess Elizabeth as she was then, with her Sister Princess Margaret being shown round by Michael Balcon LEFT and Reginald Baker

BELOW – A similar Photograph from a different angle

I do know that she also visited Denham in the Summer of 1951 where she watched scenes being films of ‘The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men’ at Denham Film Studios.

In Richard Todd’s Autobiography – he played Robin Hood – he mentions that Walt Disney came over to Denham near the end of June 1951 and apparently he was very pleased with the way the filming was progressing.

Coinciding with Walt Disney’s stop over, the then Princess Elizabeth paid a visit to Denham Film Studios accompanied only be her Lady In Waiting and equerry. The future Queen was shown by Walt Disney and the Art Director Carmen Dillon around the outside sets and the costume department.  Perce Pearce the Producer of the film insisted that filming should continue as normal as that is what the young Princess wanted to see. So for about twenty minutes the young princess stood quietly in a dark corner, while filming carried on, then she gave a friendly wave and slipped out from the Sound Stage. We have no idea which scene she saw being filmed.

ABOVE – maybe this is the scene she saw being shot – I don’t think it is because this was later in the film and for some reason I think that filming was probably in sequence rather than disjointed as it sometimes is.

It could have been this scene in Robin Hood’s camp ABOVE

Victor Mature gives a wonderful performance in this film – one that in my opinion deserved an Oscar – and that would have probably been backed up by his Co-star Richard Burton who was very impressed by Victor Mature describing him as a ‘wonderful man’

ABOVE – a signed photograph of Victor Mature in the Robe

BELOW – a scene from the film

After this he played the same role of Demetrius in the follow-up ‘Demetrius and the Gladiators’ – both films doing extremely well at the Box Office.

Someone once commented that Producers liked Victor Mature because most films that he was in made money – you can’t say that of many actors.

My Dad loved Victor Mature in The Robe so much so that after this film, he went to see nearly every film that he was in. He was my Dad’s favourite actor. I do remember him going to see ‘Zarak’ – a film that was made in England and again one that did very well financially.

Sherlock Holmes is certainly a fictional character that seems to intrigue us all judging by the interest and the number of films made about him, the many Television Series and the excellent Radio Dramas with firstly Carlton Hobbs as Holmes and then later, Clive Merrison.

I do remember in the very early fifties on Radio hearing and being fascinated by an adaptation of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ and then later came the Hammer Film Production with Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes in the same story in 1959.

However in the early Sixties ITV ran the Basil Rathbone films which were not big budget and not at all true to the novels – in fact they were virtually all upgraded in time to the Forties – but somehow we loved them. Maybe it was Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes – he certainly looked the part – and Nigel Bruce’s bumbling Dr Watson that we thought was just perfect – it certainly was perfect for the way the films were made or maybe, and more likely, it is the timing of the films being shown to an audience that had never seen them before.

My own two favourites are ‘The Scarlet Claw’ and ‘The House of Fear’ – I remember Basil Rathbone pacing up and down outside that large cliff-top house in The House of Fear – and we the audience and Dr Watson could not work out what he was doing and why he was doing it. In fact he had noticed and was checking that the house measured much more externally than it did on the inside – leading him to discover ? Well if you haven’t seen it I had better not reveal just what that is.

ABOVE and BELOW – The House of Fear

The Scarlet Claw’ was quite disturbing because of what seemed to be a serial killer on the loose against a snowy landscape but the killer was driven, we later learn, by revenge for past injustices – and he carried out his horrifying retribution against the perpetrators from years before.

ABOVE – Still from The Scarlet Claw

To the purist these Basil Rathbone films were not really appreciated although I have to say that when Universal started the series in 1939 they kicked off with ‘The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ and then ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ which were big budget productions and right on it as regards the period and the style.

I always remember the very last line of one of the films when Sherlock Holmes turned to Watson and said ‘Watson, the needle’ a reference to Holme’s cocaine habit which is never explored again thankfully and only mildly hinted at in the books.

ABOVE – The 1939 Film Version

Apparently in the USA Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce played these roles on the Radio for quite a few years and very successfully too.

In Britain Peter Cushing again played Holmes in a lavish BBC Television production of The Hound of the Baskervilles and this time he had Nigel Stock as Dr. Watson who was excellent in the role. This is one of my favourite adaptations of the story which was shown in two parts on BBC Television in September 1968 – A Colour Production

Later of course we had the superb Jeremy Brett TV series and this time there were two Dr Watsons – first it was David Burke and later Edward Hardwicke. Both were good but my preference would be Edward Hardwicke in this role.

Now back to Radio and Carlton Hobbs who played Holmes for a long time alongside Norman Shelley as Dr Watson. These episodes I believe are still available and I remember them as being very good. I must seek them out again and have a listen.

Somehow Radio drama – which I love – has a power that the other visual ones do not have – they can and do harness the mind with its incredible power, to bring these stories and others to life in a way that visual ones can’t because the characters and the scenes are already there but on Radio those same scenes are conjured up by each and everyone of us – in our mind’s eye.

A colourful adventure film set in Africa

I am reminded of another film I really like set in Africa which was ‘Tanganyika’ 1954 with Van Heflin and Ruth Roman. It doesn’t seem to get good reviews but is certainly does from me – although filmed entirely in and around Hollywood it has that African feel.

‘Beyond Mombasa’ in truth I have not yet seen but it gets some poor reviews but I have a feeling that I will like it – in fact it is just they type of film that I enjoy – with Adventure, Glamour, African locations, Technicolor and Action.

Cornel Wilde is in Africa having been sent for by his brother who even made hotel reservations in Mombasa for him. Upon arrival he finds kindly missionary Leo Genn and his anthropologist niece  Donna Reed breaking the bad news about his brother’s death at the hands of a revived cult of the Leopard. 

Determined to get to the bottom of things, Wilde goes with Genn and Reed into the interior of Kenya, Beyond Mombasa to find where his brother might have found uranium. Their guide is another partner of the brother Christopher Lee and they’re to join yet a third partner Ron Randell near the mine.

Probably an  attempt to copy the 1950 “King Solomon’s Mines” and the success that film had –  in Columbia’s “Beyond Mombasa,” . The story is notably similar—an expedition goes into the African veld to solve the mystery of the death of an explorer who had discovered a valuable mine. A good deal of African fauna and flora is observed en route, and the picture is photographed in colour so that it captures and entertains the eye.   “Beyond Mombasa” is  a colourful  African adventure film made on location – however many of the scenes were shot on stages in London –

The cast has Cornel Wilde playing the leader of the expedition, Donna Reed as the pretty lady who goes along, Leo Genn as her seemingly gentle uncle and Ron Randell as the white hunter

Christopher Lee is excellent as the only elegant member of the party, a dashing French hunter in Africa leading the others into the depths of the jungle to solve the mystery of Cornel Wilde’s brother’s mysterious death.

Eddie Calvert – ‘The Man with the Golden Trumpet’ – has a guest performance in this colourful safari film.

There is excitement and charm to the film, the jungle environments are terrific with their hidden dangers.  It’s an entertainment with a fresh and nice dialogue, that at least should leave you happy and content afterwards when the curtain has fallen on this exotic drama

ABOVE – Donna Reed takes a shower

Eddie Calvert plays the theme from the film – released on record

This one is something of a curio from then end of the fifties decade Curse Of The Undead (1959)

Curse Of The Undead is a really strange one in a 50s Westerns list – if there is such a thing. It is  a both Western and Vampire picture nailed together. It somehow stays fairly true to the conventions of both types though.

The combining of westerns with horror has not always made for great films.  We did have  “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” and “Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter”.

However “Curse of the Undead”is quite a good one.  This 1959 picture stars Eric Fleming as a frontier preacher who is confronted with a vampire in the form of a hired gun, portrayed with sinister, yet sympathetic overtones by Michael Pate.

Michael Pate’s character had committed suicide after murdering his brother, and that had condemned him for all eternity to be a vampire.

This particular vampire  however seems able to walk around in the daylight with  no ill effects, and we all know from the films,  that vampires  cannot be exposed to sunlight, or they will be destroyed.

ABOVE It looks as though – in the USA – this film was on a bill with the Hammer hit ‘The Mummy’  – a film I really like

Curse of the Undead had the novelty of being the first vampire Western.   In the 1940s and 50s, the Western was as popular and far more prolific in its output than the modern action and science-fiction films are. I think I have pointed out  in the past that the 1951 Western Film Review gave details and a list of around 115 Western films released that year.   They created a  vision of the Old West where simple tales of heroism could play out in which the good guys WHO dispensed justice with six guns and their fists. All of the  heroic types that the action film draws on today had their roots  in the Western.

Michael Pate ABOVE was an Australian-born actor who played numerous parts in B movies in the 1940s and 50s, becoming a prolific guest star on TV shows of the 1960s, where he was more often cast as an ethnic character, in particular as an American Indian.

As the vampire, Michael Pate has a terse and harsh presence, a sense of contained danger that immediately makes him stand out from the rest of the characters around him. He had a long career in films and Television – he was in Gunsmoke and   Rawhide on Television  among many other roles. The rest of the cast of the film are largely unknown names today.

Curse of the Undead was shot on the Universal Studios backlot, using the standing Western town, sets and warehouse costumes that were also used in dozens of other B Western films of the era. It is even shot with the same typically stolid and unimaginative camera set-ups and flat photography of these B Western programmers.   Director Edward Dein had worked as a screenwriter during the 1940s where he had written a number of Westerns.

He had also written several horror films, including additional dialogue for the Val Lewton film The Leopard Man (1943) and the screenplays for Calling Dr Death (1943), Jungle Woman (1944), The Soul of a Monster (1944) and The Cat Creeps (1946). He made seven films as director, including two co-directed in Spain. His only other venture into this type of film  as a director was The Leech Woman (1960) about a rejuvenation process.