Belinda Lee should have had a much better career than she did because she was a very good actress – and this ‘The Secret Place’ is regarded as one of her best films.

Sadly she died in California in a car crash – she was not the driver – a few years after this, in 1961

The Story of the film – Gerry Carter (Ronald Lewis) and his pal Steve (Michael Gwynn) are planning a jewel robbery in London’s Hatton Garden, but they need a policeman’s uniform to do the job as planned. That is how Molly Wilson (Belinda Lee) ends up involved as not only is she Gerry’s girlfriend but her brother Mike (David McCallum) is also involved in the plan. Molly’s part is that a young boy called Freddie (Michael Brooke) is besotted with her and will pretty much do anything she asks of him and that includes taking one of his police father’s uniforms.

‘The Secret Place’ – Gerry and his gang pull off the robbery but afterwards discover things haven’t gone to plan, leading to them wanting to stash the stolen jewels at Molly’s place in her gramophone. Then the gramophone changes hands to complicate things

“The Secret Place” has a good cast with David McCallum, Belinda Lee and Michael Brooke all delivering solid performances. In fact young Michael Brooke stands out because he delivers that childhood infatuation of young Freddie quite brilliantly yet we also get to see the conflict as he realises Molly used him to get a police uniform.

If you want to get a good feel for 1950s Britain, this is the place for you. The street scenes in this film are pure gold. The destruction rendered on the country by the Second World War is still all around. Children play among the rubble of bombed-out houses and and perilously tumbled-down factories. Cars are few.

This is the background for the story of a young boy whose naive crush on a pretty young woman is repaid with betrayal. However she, too, is a victim, being manipulated by the scheming Gerry Carter, played by Ronald Lewis.

The premiere of The Secret Place was at the Gaumont Theatre in London on 6 February 1957

This film is due to be shown on Talking Pictures next week.

‘Stranger From Venus’ is one of the fore runners of the wave of excellent British science fiction films from Hammer Films thhat brought in now familiar names like Terrence Fisher and Val Guest

‘Stranger From Venus’ is not in the same league as some of the films to come, but it is quite an interesting one nonetheless

Patricia Neal had recently married Roald Dahl (with whom she settled in Buckinghamshire to raise a family) and she was offered this part in this British made Sci Fi film

Helmut Dantine plays the mysterious stranger – Derek Bond is a Government official who alerts the Authorities that an alien has arrived.

The film was made at MGM British Studios at Boreham Wood and filmed in Black and White with a 1 hour 15 minutes running time so I am not sure if this would go out as a second feature

By 1954 the British had entered the science fiction market again after some trepidation, although it was still a genre reserved for cheap knock-offs. However, the hugely popular live TV-series The Quatermass Experiment (1953 ) had left the British public hungry for more. Hammer and small outfits like Gainsborough had started dabbling in the genre with mixed results.

Just like in Devil Girl from Mars, the lion’s part of the proceedings take place in a very British-seeming inn in the middle of nowhere. Young Susan North (Patricia Neal) drives home from a meeting with her friend, and is blinded by a light in the sky, which causes her to crash her car – seemingly to her death. Later the same evening a strange man appears at the inn. We know he is strange because he only drinks water and we just see the back of his head. And he assures Susan’s boyfriend, a government official called Arthur Walker (Derek Bond) that Ms. North is quite alright. And fair enough, she later walks into the inn – her wounds miraculously healed, and with no memory of who or what saved – or resurrected – her.

Turns out the strange visitor, played by Helmut Dantine, is actually a stranger from Venus, in possession of superhuman powers of healing, invulnerability and mind-reading. It turns out he is a scout for a Venusian mothership that has planned to land in ”Britain” to hold a conference with all world leaders to warn them about the dangers of mankind’s newfound discovery of nuclear weapons. He holds a minor conference around the pub table with some dignitaries from the ”British” authorities as a warm-up. He is most interested in working in the inn’s garden, which he finds enchanting.

Patricla Neal: An Unquiet Life, Neal and her husband, famed author Roald Dahl had just bought a summer house in Britain, and needed money to fix it up. Encouraged by Dahl, Neal took the part, as it would only be a couple of weeks’ work in the British summer.

Even though this was a Box Office disappointment at the time of it’s release, this film has very recently found the popularity that it always should have had.

When the film was being made, a crew of about 25 or more technicians went out to Belgium and stayed in a hotel in Brussels. One or two of the outdoor scenes were filmed around the outskirts of Brussels. Close by the small town of Leau with a population of about 2000 people, about 45 miles from Brussels, was where around 4 days of filming was done.

Other important scenes were around the Chateau de Sterrebecke. This Chateau was the real centre of filming although already the interiors had been constructed at Elstree film studios.

The steps up to the Chateau with the railings can clearly be seen in the film – SEE BELOW

Twenty Five minutes of film were shot on location in Belgium which led to about 15 minutes being used in the final film.

ABOVE – The Nazi flag flies from the Town Hall and the names of the executed townsfolk appear on the notice board

ABOVE – Maria Schell, the only artist to stay with the unit during location work, in a scene where she reads that, among others, her father is among the dead.

Both Barbara Mullen and Marius Goring were out there in Belgium and both were in some of the scenes shot there.

Back st Elstree BELOW as Director Compton Bennett who had been out to Brussels for the filming, is seen here back at Elstree discussing the piano playing sequence with Maria Schell and Marius Goring

This was Compton Bennett’s very next film after he had directed the ‘blockbuster’ at the Box Office – ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ 1950

He must have been in Hollywood then because just before that he had directed ‘The Forsyte Saga’ with Greer Garson and Errol Flynn as Soames – a part he was very good in.

Interesting to see this particular double feature – and the stars of the day. About a decade before this film – Steel City – was made, we had a classic which centred on the Coal Mining Industry ‘ How Green Was My Valley’ which told of family life, love, happiness and tragedy in one of those pit villages in the Welsh mountains – although it was filmed in Hollywood.

‘Steel Town’ was filmed in Technicolor and had a more dramatic and different storyline in some ways although the similarity was it’s link to another major industry – Steel – this time in America

Steel Town is a nice B film from Universal studios .

The film centres on Steel Works with all the dangers therein at that time.

In it John Lund plays the son of the company owner, who has not forgotten his roots and because of this he sends his son to work there starting at the bottom.

John Lund is sent to lodge with an old friend from his father’s early days – William Harrigan and his wife Eileen Crowe. Also at the house is Ann Sheridan their daughter and the romantic lead.

James Best is cast as a young steel factory worker whose dad was killed at the mill in an accident. He’s a reminder of what can go wrong.

John Lund has a rival for Ann Sheridan in Howard Duff another worker at the steel plant.

The scene is set for an interesting situation

In – Flesh and Fury

Tony Curtis and the very pretty Mona Freeman ABOVE

Tony Curtis plays a deaf boxer who Jan Sterling takes an interest in. However he does have a kindly manager Wallace Ford, but she wants him to hit the big time as soon as possible with all the financial advantages that gives, even if it means facing dirty fighters who will cripple him.

When Mona Freeman turns up to interview Tony Curtis for her magazine, she takes a more sympathetic view of the him because her own father had also been deaf.

Universal was putting Tony Curtis into a lot of films at that time.

In real life Jan Sterling was brought up at the upper end of New York society, travelled the world as a child, was instructed by private tutors, and by the time she hit Broadway in the late 1930s, playing aristocratic English women.

A role in the touring company of BORN YESTERDAY brought her to Hollywood’s attention.

Jan Sterling had been married to John Merivale from 1941 until 1948, who later lived with Vivien Leigh from 1958 until her death in 1967,

In 1986 he married his long-time friend and actress Dinah Sheridan

Once described as having “one of the most photogenically perfect male faces in movies”, the affable and athletic, blonde and blue-eyed Richard Denning was never a major Hollywood star but was popular.

He had one major starring role – with Dorothy Lamour in Beyond The Blue Horizon – prior to war service, after which he starred in B thrillers and westerns (he was married to one of the great B-movie heroines, Evelyn Ankers).

In the Fifties he developed a cult following for his leading roles in such monster films as The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Target Earth and The Black Scorpion, while television viewers will remember him as the Governor on Hawaii Five-0, a part he played for 12 years.

Born Louis Albert Heindrich Denninger Jnr in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1914, he was the son of a garment manufacturer and attended Woodbury Business College, graduating with a Masters in Business Administration. His father wanted him to join the family business, but Denning had already become interested in acting.

After a night-school course in drama, and performances in a small theatre, he entered a radio contest, “Do You Want To Be An Actor?”, choosing to perform a scene from the film Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and won his heat – one of 13. All winners were given a screen test by Warners in the spring of 1936. “I never saw the test, and wondered if they actually put any film in the cameras, but I was later told by my agent that Warners had been impressed but told him that I was too much like another young man they had under contract – Errol Flynn!”

Securing a long-term contract with Paramount, he was advised by the head of the talent department, Ted Lesser, that a change of name was necessary.

From 1937 to 1942 Denning made over 50 films for Paramount, many of them fleeting bit roles.

The following year he had his best role to date when loaned to Columbia for Adam Had Four Sons (1941). In this popular drama (Ingrid Bergman’s second Hollywood film) Denning was stoically honourable as he rejected the advances of his brother’s scheming wife (Susan Hayward). Paramount then gave the actor the leading role apposite Dorothy Lamour in Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942). This film movies was to remain Richard Denning’s favourite Hollywood role.

I have to say that ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’ was a really entertaining film with the most beautiful Technicolor locations you could dream of. The colour on that film is just as good as anything you would see on screen.

Both me and my daughter love this film

After the war, Denning could not get an acting job for 18 months. “We lived in a trailer on the ocean front, and I put down a hundred lobster traps. We ate and sold lobsters and made a good living. Later we realised that was the happiest 18 months of our lives.”

Denning then got a major break on radio when asked to replace Lee Bowman as a banker married to a scatterbrained wife (Lucille Ball) in the hit series My Favorite Husband. His film work was now in B movies or playing supporting roles in major ones – in both When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948) and An Affair to Remember (1957) he was in love with the heroines (Betty Grable and Deborah Kerr respectively) but withdrew gracefully when he realised they loved another, and he good-naturedly played a physical- fitness enthusiast made the butt of much humour in Douglas Sirk’s Weekend With Father (1951).

But America was now at war, and after a loan-out to Fox to play a detective in the ingenous thriller Quiet Please, Murder (1942), Denning joined the Navy as a First Class Petty Officer in the submarine service. During the filming of Quiet Please, Murder, he had eloped to Las Vegas with Evelyn Ankers, who broke her engagement to the actor Glenn Ford to marry him. Known as “Queen of the Screamers” for her horror roles at Universal, Ankers frequently co-starred with the heavy drinker Lon Chaney Jnr, with whom she did not get along, and at a Universal function, the friction between Chaney and Denning reached a point where Denning threw his sundae into Chaney’s face and Chaney had to be restrained from throwing hot coffee into Denning’s.

Jack Arnold’s classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), which practically saved Universal from bankruptcy, was the first of Richard Denning’s monster films and gave him a rare unsympathetic role as a single-minded scientist.

He then battled earth-conquering robots in Target Earth (1954), produced by Herman Cohen . In Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), he unmasked a scientist who revives the dead with the help of brain tissue under high voltage then uses the zombies to take revenge on his enemies. The Day The World Ended (1956) was Roger Corman’s first science-fiction film, with Denning playing a geologist, one of seven survivors of a complete nuclear holocaust.

Several fading Hollywood stars at this time accepted offers to star in British B movies, and in 1956 Denning made a film for the production company Butchers, Assignment Redhead.

In Hollywood it was back to horror with The Black Scorpion (1957) co-starring Mara Corday and distinguished by the stop-frame animation work of Willis O’Brien, famous for King Kong.

He returned to England in 1960 to film a 39-episode television series, The Flying Doctor. This was quite successful and it gave him increased popularity in England

Richard Denning and his wife and daughter lived in North London in the fifties – he made at least one film here and this TV Series – Flying Doctor -which was made in England with exteriors shot in Australia

The same year he appeared with his wife in No Greater Love, a film produced under the auspices of the Lutheran church, of which the couple had become active members. After appearing in the horror anthology Twice Told Tales (1963), Denning retired from films and moved with his wife to Maui in Hawaii, where he became an executive of the Boy Scouts of America. He stated at the time, “My wonderful wife suggested that, since we had worked and saved together since our marriage, perhaps the time had come to do the things we really enjoyed and at a comfortable tempo,” and he described their home as “about as close to Paradise as we could find on earth – and we love it more each day.”

When he accepted the role of the Governor in Hawaii Five-0 in 1968, Evelyn Ankers was offered the part of his wife but declined. “She prefers to go to Honolulu and shop,” said Denning.

Evelyn Ankers I remember so well from ‘Tarzan’s Magic Fountain’ with Lex Barker – one of the best Tarzan films and certainly Lex Barker’s best – it was his first as Tarzan.

The ones that followed were all good though.

Before this she had been in Universal Horror films appearing along with Lon Chaney Jr who she is pictured with below. They seem to be having a laugh

She appeared in ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein’ ‘The Wolf Man’ and ‘Son of Dracula’ – all of which also had Lon Chaney Jr.

She said of him that when he wasn’t drinking, he could be one of the sweetest men in the world

I hadn’t realised that she had been engaged to Glenn Ford but when she met Richard Denning she broke it off with Glenn who was away on location filming at the time.

The is one from later in the decade – Cinemascope and Metrocolor – set in the Amazon jungle. What a storyline – the sort that really appeals to me. It comes from the biggest studio MGM and the budget certainly looks as though a lot went into the making of the film even though the Box Office performance was poor.

It stars Anthony Perkins and Audrey Hepburn and is directed by her husband Mel Ferrer

In the October 10th 1959 edition of ‘Picturegoer’ magazine, the review was non too complimentary see it, just see the exciting and colourful trailer below.

The review says that the colour photography in the jungle is stunning – it seems though that a lot of the outdoor scenes were done back in Hollywood.

This is old-style Hollywood, matinee magic in CinemaScope, with the added wonder of Stereophonic sound. How we loved that

MGM spent over one million dollars (a great deal of money in 1959) getting shots of South America to mix in with the main filming done on MGM’s back lot. The mixing in of the shots is well done

Guyana – The opening credits are set against the background of the mighty Kaieteur falls and the Kanuku mountains.

The Author of the original book, W.H. Hudson was also a naturalist and ornithologist by trade and had the advantage over Conan Doyle because he knew about the locations he wrote about. The film has some lush photography and in fact was shot on location in Venezuela. In fact it opens with a view of Angel Falls, one of the great natural wonders of the world.

As regards the cast, Audrey Hepburn is at her most mysterious and bewitching. No one else could have possibly played Rima with the charm tinged with mystery that Audrey, at her most radiant, brings to the role. Then, there’s Henry Silva as a virile, villainous Indian.

ABOVE – Lee J Cobb and Anthony Perkins

Anthony Perkins and Audrey Hepburn ABOVE

Just watch the film as a stand-alone entity, brimming with gorgeous scenery and two very fine and apt performances

Anthony Perkins is a great ,and Audrey’s performance is magical. The story is so enchanting and deserves much more credit than it has been given. It was thrilling and romantic giving the audience a sense of hope in the ending of the film.

Green mansions deserves to be released on DVD ,hopefully with special features such as a biography on the late Anthony Perkins ,and commentary on the book.

This episode which was a very good one in the Scotland Yard Series was on Talking Pictures this evening July 5th 2021 – Introduced by Edgar Lustgarten as always – who somehow added that touch of class to the proceedings

A seemingly respectable bookshop owner called Frederick Stafford (Ivan Craig) calls the police and confesses to accidentally killing his wife. He is duly arrested by the police at the scene of his Kensington mews flat and charged with manslaughter.

Scotland Yard’s Supt Daker (Kenneth Henry) and Detective Forbes (Frank Forsyth) question his neighbours who all confirm that Stafford is, on the whole, a respectable person; although he is rather furtive in his manner and has a slight temper. He was also devoted to his invalid wife and could not do enough for her – apparently.

However Supt Daker isn’t satisfied since if he knew that his wife was so ill why did her row with her so violently? In addition, Stafford seems remarkably calm and composed for a man who is potentially facing imprisonment for manslaughter. He further arouses suspicion when he asks his lawyer to renew the lease on this house because, after all, his future is far from certain and why on earth would anybody want to go back to such a place after what has occurred there?

Ivan Craig as Stafford ABOVE

They suspect that there is something or someone hidden in the house. With the help of a young undercover female police officer, Sgt Blake Patricia Driscoll – the days she found fame in Sherwood Forest with Richard Green in Robin Hood – Supt Daker is able to keep tabs on Stafford’s shop assistant Joan Price (Jean Lodge) whom, it transpires, is engaged to be married to a man called Roberts.

Her fiance is apparently away on business, but a description is obtained from a barman and it matches that of Stafford.

The barman is played by ‘Captain Peacock ( Frank Thornton) – I remember him playing a barman again in an episode of ‘Steptoe and Son’ when Harold took his father, Albert, out in the West End to celebrate his birthday – and we all remember Captain Peacock in ‘Are you being Served’ – brilliant !

Supt Daker and Detective Forbes are now convinced that Stafford cold bloodedly murdered his wife and arranged it to look like and accident before confessing in order to get a lighter sentence leaving him free to marry Joan when he gets out. Unfortunately, they do not have anything to make it stick before a jury. Then, suddenly, a lead presents itself from the most unlikely source: a discarded bicycle in the mews where Stafford lives. It has been there for days and it is traced to a window cleaner who has gone missing. ‘The Silent Witness’ is discovered in the form of the dead body of the window cleaner who had witnessed the murder – and who Stafford had the killed and transported his body to the house and upstairs in the loft

The direction is by Montgomery Tully, who was one of Britain’s most prolific makers of shorts and ‘B’ pictures throughout the 1950’s-60’s. He clocked up fourteen episodes of this series in total.

ABOVE – Frank Forsyth as Detective Forbes

There were 120 episodes of The Fugitive running over four years. The climax of the series came when Dr Richard Kimble, who was on the run because he had been wrongly charged with the murder of his wife, finally meets and confronts the one armed man who is the murderer -we had been all waiting for over the years – in fact it did seem in mid series that the many adventures he had, made this main storyline seem secondary.

That last episode in the USA was watched by a record mind boggling 78 million viewers.

David Janssen was Dr Richard Kimble.

A little later, David Janssen again hit gold with another great series on Television ‘Harry O’ – a detective role that really caught on

“Harry O” is considered by most TV critics as a small masterpiece of the television form and David Janssen an example of the special charisma that very few actors have before the television camera.

It was television that saved David Janssen from a career of B-movie obscurity. First, the actor and producer Dick Powell chose him to portray “Richard Diamond,” one of the first of hard-boiled TV detectives.

In the 1957-60 series, Janssen’s secretary, “Sam,” appeared only as a pair of legs and a voice. It was Mary Tyler Moore’s first TV series role.

Then came “The Fugitive,” in which he played a Midwestern doctor, Richard Kimble, wrongly accused of murdering his wife constantly on the run from the police and trying to find the real killer, a one-armed man.

After “The Fugitive” ran its course, there was what seemed an unending procession of made-for-TV movies and mini-series.

Some were good, some not-so-good, but David Janssen was always in demand, always working.

He started acting at the age of 9 in a Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller film “Swamp Fire.”

He was born David Meyer on March 27, 1931, in the small town of Naponee, Neb., the son a local banker and a Ziegfeld Follies girl.

After his parents were divorced, David Janssen’s mother brought him to Los Angeles. He graduated from Fairfax High School, attended UCLA for a semester, then dropped out to go into summer stock.

After an unsuccessful attempt to land Broadway roles, David Janssen returned to Hollywood, where he signed to a contract by 20th Century-Fox and took his stepfather’s last name.

The studio bleached his hair blond, unsuccessfully tried to talk him into ear surgery to lessen his resemblance to Clark Gable, then dropped him entirely.

Universal signed David Janssen and his streak of B-pictures began. He did 32 movies for Universal, few of them memorable.

“I played an ‘agreer,’ “ David Janssen later said of this phase of his career. “The star would say, ‘Don’t you think so.’ I’d agree with him and disappear from the picture.”

Last came “The Fugitive,”—one of the highest rated TV series of its time—stardom, and a never-ending stream of scripts and film offers.

There were more than 100 movies in all, many of them made for TV. At the time of his death, David Janssen had just finished a major film, “Inchon” with Sir Laurence Olivier and had begun work on a TV movie, “Father Damien.”

He died very suddenly in February 1980 at the age of 48. He had no previous history of heart problems but he died of a massive heart attack.

This film was shown on one of the Satellite Film Channels today and it proved a little bit unusual with the stars of the film being the trains on this railway.

The film was directed by Byron Haskin who had great ability in bringing action stories to the screen – just before this he had done a superb job directing ‘Treasure Island’ for Walt Disney at Denham Films studios – Walt Disney’s first venture in to live=actio films as opposed to cartoon features – after this came ‘His Majesty O’Keefe’ and The Naked

Back in 1952, the film “Denver and Rio Grande” by Paramount Pictures was filmed on the actual Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in Colorado!

The film dramatised the history of the building of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in which the D&RGW and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (called the Cañon City & San Juan RR in the movie) clashed while trying to compete for space to build their tracks.

The two rival track gangs actually had armed confrontations for trackage rights along narrow canyons and gorges while constructing their own separate railroads!

The film starred Edmond O’Brien and Sterling Hayden and featured a staged head on train crash in which the 2-8-0 Locomotives 268 and 319 were used. Both locomotives were donated by the D&RG because they were destined to be scrapped at the time.

Note: Notice the pyrotechnics went off a split second before the two engines actually collide!

Although damaged was severe to both locomotives, they somehow managed to remain upright on the track after the explosions and crash!

Well, this film comes outside of the Fifties era, but it’s main stars were still very active into that decade and beyond.

The film is a great showcase for the wonderful talents of Michael Curtiz, Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan and Olivia de Havilland.

The final rescue scenes are great – those battle trumpets can still cause a chill to go up the spine.

It is a film with great entertainment value.

Ronald Reagan was very much underestimated as an actor much as Victor Mature was at a similar time.

Ronald Reagan was in some good films – he was teamed up again with Errol Flynn in ‘Desperate Journey’ and another film later was, of course, ‘The Hasty Heart’ made in England with Richard Todd in the leading role

RAYMOND MASSEY is especially memorable as John Brown. His earnest and single-minded portrayal of a madman-with-a-quest is the great stand-out of this film. The fiery eyes are almost hypnotic in its concentration.

Ronald Reagan and Errol Flynn are top rate.

These are actors that for better or worse will always stand out from the Hollywood crowd with their own special brand of something indescribable and timeless.