| Welcome to In The Balcony. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Plus, you'll be eligible for the monthly $1 million prize. (Not really.) Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| The Flanagan Boy (a/k/a Bad Blonde) (1953) | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 9 2012, 06:37 PM (176 Views) | |
| Laughing Gravy | Feb 9 2012, 06:37 PM Post #1 |
|
Look for In The Balcony on Facebook!
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
|
![]() Yes, I'm still going through my early Hammer films... Barbara Payton, brought to Bray to do Four Sided Triangle, stuck around for this one, and she seems a lot more sure of herself (and pretty) in this picture, a nice, seamy role for her. Reginald LeBorg (The Mummy's Ghost, some of the Inner Sanctum series, one of the Captive Wild Woman pictures) directs a pretty good picture, and - an actual, real, yep yep yep, FILM NOIR, minus only some rainy city streets. Tony Wright (who's very good) is a young prizefighter, Sid James (who's even better) is his trainer, and Frederick Valk is his new manager. Alas, Valk is old and fat, and his wife is Miss Payton, who has a wandering eye and some obvious revved-up loins. She seduces Tony (she licks her lips while she watches his fights; I can't believe he didn't find that quite distracting) and persuades him into killing her husband, but when the deed is done, guilt consumes him and his fight game really goes down the toilet. A good script and very good cast make this one of the better Hammer offerings of this period, despite the usual itty-bitty sets (the "pub" is a closeup of one booth; the "nightclub" is one large room with great big doors that the Mummy is going to smash through in a few years; the boxing arena looks as though the fire marshall wouldn't allow more than 20 people inside). Also, why couldn't Hammer find Italians to play Italians? This guy's German accent as he struggles to speak Italian is pretty funny, no? And pretty unintelligible, yes? It's on the same DVD as The Last Page (Man Bait), which I've watched and reviewed already, so THIS disc won't get touched again for a couple of decades. Hammer's next two releases were The Saint's Return with Louis Hayward and Blood Orange with Tom Conway, and I don't have either of those, so we'll be skipping to 36 Hours with Dan Duryea next. Please sit on the edge of your seat a week or so 'til I get to it, 'kay? |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
![]() |
|
| « Previous Topic · The Dark Aisle · Next Topic » |





![]](http://z2.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)




10:54 AM Jul 11