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Reviews
Tiger in the Smoke (1956)
A neglected near-masterpiece which still casts a sinister spell.
I saw this gripping,atmospheric little picture on its initial British release half a century ago.I was eight years old,and it's one of a handful of British pictures from that era which haunted me for years. It's very rarely shown on British T.V.,so I never got to see it again until 1985. It had held up remarkably well, and I've watched the videotaped copy I made several times since. As far as I'm aware it was never made commercially available on video, and I'm hoping it might join the growing number of rare British thrillers from the fifties made available on DVD.
Director Roy Baker is probably best known these days for the horror pictures he made for Hammer and Amicus in the seventies, all of which are markedly inferior to his earlier British work. His first picture, the moody psychological thriller "The October Man",(1948) starring John Mills,is exceptionally good, and "Tiger in the Smoke" has all the same virtues; a strong cast of seasoned character actors, a pungent sense of place, highly effective suspense and a sinister aura of moral decay. Early scenes involving a seedy gang of ex-commando street musicians are masterly.
Muriel Pavlow was surely the most beautiful and talented of the Rank Organisation "charm school" actresses, and Tony Wright is chillingly effective as the psychotic Johnny Havoc, whose search for hidden treasure sets the plot in motion. The critic and theorist Raymond Durgnat wrote in 1969 that this was the most dreamlike British film outside of the horror genre. It deserves wider appreciation.
Konga (1961)
Endearingly awful - but with an great music score!
"Konga" is a badly written, acted and directed piece of poverty row exploitation British-style,but you'd have to be utterly cold hearted not to get a lot of fun out of it. The final scenes as the giant ape lays waste to the Merton Park area of West London had audiences in hysterics (I saw it on it's original release, double-billed with "The Hellfire Club"). Come on now, any movie with early sixties Brit. Pop star Jess Conrad cast in a straight dramatic part has to be worth a look.
Composer Gerald Schurmann's music under the opening credits promise something a lot more substantial, though; it's a great,dark orchestral score worthy of a much better picture. Schurmann might have been the British Bernard Herrman, but his immense talents rarely earned him a picture worthy of them. Still, that's British Movies for you.