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.

List of the cast for a production of “Gaslight”at the Empire Theatre, Cleethorpes, 1953.

The part of Mrs Manningham was played by Rosamund John, who was a major star of British stage and screen in the 1940s and 1950s. She had significant roles in two classic aviation-related films from the ‘40s: “The Way to the Stars” and “The First of the Few”.

Here she is a decade later at the Westminster Theatre in London ABOVE – so it does seem that her marriage to politician John Silkin did not altogether stop her acting career as these two plays are well after they wed.

Back to her beginning  the  actor-producer Robert Donat  had spotted her while she was working at Stratford for C.B.Cochrane  doing walk on parts and understudying several Shakespearean roles, and he then cast her as an understudy in his production Red Night (1936).

Robert Donat’s biographer Kenneth Barrows recounts that the actor not only had great faith in  Rosamund John’s ability – he was to write in his journals, “One day I shall be proud to say I was one of the first to recognise her great gifts” – but he also fell deeply in love with her and, though he was married, by Christmas 1938 he was writing that  Rosamund John was “the first truly passionate affair of my life”.

Rosamund John did only a few  films .   Sadly this splendid actress is all, but forgotten nowadays.

Though her films were few, most were classics. The Gentle Sex directed by Leslie Howard was a tribute of the women in the ATS and then  The First Of The Few. She also played a nurse in The Lamp Still Burns with Stewart Granger. However, Rosamund John had a memorable role in The Way To The Stars were she played the films pivotal role of Toddy, playing the girlfriend, wife and widow of Michael Redgrave.

There was also Fame Is The Spur where she played the wife of Labour M.P Michael Redgrave, life.

Then one I remember more thany any other was Green For Danger, where she again plays a nurse, only a murdering one. She then  played a policewoman in Street Corner at a time when women Police Officers weren’t high profile

Rosamund John ABOVE a letter to an fan after she had been appearing in a stage play in Nottingham.

Rosamund John  – ABOVE a Signed picture

ABOVE Rosamund John with James Mason in The Upturned Glass

Rosamund John  – ABOVE – ‘Fame is the Spur’ 1947

ABOVE – Rosamund John and Robert Donat – Lovers in real life- seen here in a stage performance of The Devils Disciple in London’s West End in 1938

This film is on Talking Pictures this evening – Monday 30 March 2020 at 10 pm – Don’t miss it !!

David Tomlinson and Jean Simmons – ABOVE and BELOW

This is one to watch if you haven’t seem it before – I defy anyone to work our what is going on in this sinister plot where a brother and sister visit Paris at the time of the great Paris Exhibition in 1900

Everything seems just normal, until the morning after their arrival when the brother ( David Tomlinson) completely disappears and Jean Simmons his sister, starts a search but there is one big problem – no-one remembers seeing him at all and even the room he is supposed to have booked into just isn’t there.

The Hotel staff and everyone thinks that Jean Simmons is somehow losing her mind – and that her brother never existed. However she meets up with Dirk Bogarde who is an artist living in Paris – he believes her and the search commences.

What will they find ?

This is a great story – and to anyone who hasn’t seen it I can guarantee that they will be glued to the screen until the climatic ending.

There is no way that Jean Simmons could hallucinate her own brother, her only relation in the world! Stuck in France, not able to speak much French, and all alone, hers is a desperate search.

The film moves in quite a frightening way – overall it is brilliant, and a must-see.

ABOVE – Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde

ABOVE – Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde

ABOVE – Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde

Cathleen Nesbitt also stars ABOVE

These pictures I find to be quite unusual and ones that I have not seen before. They date back before the Fifties however as they appear in a Film Annual of 1948

ABOVE –  High Williams Film and Theatre actor and his son Simon who, as we know, went into the acting profession with much success – and he is at present playing Justin in ‘The Archers’ on BBC Radio – I am a regular listener to this programme

ABOVE – Rosamund  John with her husband Russell Lloyd and son John at home. Russell Lloyd was a very successful Film Editor – he and Rosamund John were divorced the very next year in 1949 – but soon after in 1950 he married Valerie Cox and remained married to her until his death in 2008.

I am puzzled however by this picture because within a short time of this picture being taken Rosamund John had divorced Russell Lloyd and married the politician John Silkin who she had met through her interest in politics. He was nearly ten years younger that Rosamund but they soon had a child – a son – and went on to live a long and very happy life together. He became an MP and was in the Labour Government of Harold Wilson – she frequently attended Parliament to listen to him speak.

ABOVE – John Mills on the set of ‘The October Man’ – another film I like very much. Here he is with his daughter Juliet who had a small part in the film – as she did in ‘The History of Mr Polly’ soon afterwards.

ABOVE – David Farrar in grim-face pose with his Daughter Barbara. He is mowing the lawn at their home is Dulwich – could that have been an early motor mower ?   He again looks suitably dis-interested.

More about Barbara Farrar in later years, to come on this Blog. Not that I have found much but one very interesting snippet of her later life in South Africa

Stewart Granger ABOVE with his Daughter Lindsay – one of two children he had with his wife Elspeth March – they also had a son Jamie. They were divorced around the time – or a bit after this picture was taken.

Dennis Price with his daughters Susan and Tessa. He looks very happy here – as he would with those two girls beside him.  He was at the peak of his career at this time. About the time of ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ I would guess – and that saw him at his best in my view.

Alec Guinness gets most of the plaudits for the film, but Dennis Price was great – and was in nearly every scene in the film – and even was the narrator of the story.  Wonderful performance.

ABOVE – Margaret Lockwood and daughter ‘Toots’ who herself became an actress of some note both in films and early Television.

ABOVE – Phyllis Calvert and her Daughter Ann Auriol in the garden of their Cotswold Home – mind you it doesn’t look much like Phyllis Calvert here, I have to say !

Children of the Stars

This film came out a little bit later than  the Steve Reeves ones – ‘Hercules Unchained’ was one of them.  Steve Reeves was good in these and fitted the role of Hercules well. The first Hercules was 1959 – and Steve Reeves continued to play in this type of role for the next decade almost – and very successfully too.

He looked the part and seemed very ‘at home’ with these roles  – more so that Rory Calhoun in this one.

“Colossus of Rhodes” is a good  action thriller with  Rory Calhoun in a role that you would not normally associate him with but he  is pretty good as the Greek adventurer  visiting the island who finds himself  in the middle of a sinister conspiracy. His villa is invaded one night by mysterious marauders and a very exciting fight ensues with  Rory Calhoun outnumbered and desperately fighting until he’s overpowered … It seems the  young lady he’s been chasing (Lea Massari) is also in the plot.

As Rory Calhoun gets more drawn in, his safety is put at risk and he has to take sides. The duel he fights inside and outside the colossal statue is an unforgettable piece of cinema. 

He suits  the devil-may-care adventurer  who is reluctantly forced into violent action to risk his own skin and stand up for what’s right.

Rory Calhoun was an underrated actor who deserved more roles than the many westerns to which he was mainly relegated. This is one of the few times he gets to break the mould. 

It is an action film with quite a good  plot and with  outstanding costumes and sets to fill up the impressive Wide screen – in SuperTotalScope

The Rhodes statue of the Colossus is a great design. The use of widescreen – Supertotalscope – is excellent. Overall, the  sets and the production values are well above average than your standard Sword & Sandal films of the day. 

As the story goes – it seems that Rebels want to overthrow the King of Rhodes because of corruption and the lack of justice but then other people within the Kingdom also want to overthrow the King and his army with a group of Macedonian “slaves” captured by Phoenicians who are actually soldiers and are brought into Rhodes.  The Rebels fight the Rhodes soldiers.

The story is not too complicated really although it sounds  like it is.  If all this action weren’t  enough, during the film’s climax we get  an earthquake which levels Rhodes.

Maybe then we can pause for breath.

According to the records that I have seen – the film brought in a profit of $350,000 which just underlines what we cinema-goers wanted to see at that time – I must admit, this type of film is just my cup of tea – even now !!

Apparently John Derek had been to original choice to take the lead role but for whatever reason he didn’t take it on – and so Rory Calhoun made the trip to Europe to do it.