Sun 17 May 2020
DEADLY DUO. United Artists, 1962. Craig Hill Craig Hill, Marcia Henderson, Robert Lowery, Dayton Lummis, Carlos Romero, Irene Tedrow, David Renard. Based on the novel The Deadly Duo by Richard Jessup. Director: Reginald Le Borg.
Based on the other work I’ve read by Richard Jessup, a fairly prolific writer of westerns and paperback crime fiction in the 50s and 60s, this might have been a good novel, an original from Dell in 1959, but even if the movie followed the book closely, which it very well may have, the translation still didn’t turn out all that well.
The story elements are all there. Her son having been killed in a racing car accident, a wealthy woman wants to obtain custody rights to her grandson, now being raised by his now single mother (Marcia Henderson), a former stripper. To that end, he hires a struggling young attorney (Craig Hill) to go to Acapulco to offer the woman $500,000 to give up the child.
When he gets there, she refuses outright, but her twin sister and her husband (Robert Lowery) have other ideas, one of which is murder, and of course you already know, I’m sure, how it is that they think they can pull it off.
The plot is intricately structured and well planned out, but the ending is telegraphed well in advance, leading to a twist ending which is no surprise at all. There’s no fun in that! It is fun to see Marcia Henderson (whom I remember from her leading role in the long-forgotten TV series Dear Phoebe) play two roles, one a dark-haired and very prim and proper mother, the other a brassy blonde floozy whose dancing career is going nowhere, now that his sister has quit the act they had together.
It is also fun to see how Robert Lowery, a long-time B-movie star in the 1940s, looked in the later stages of his career. With a mustache and generally older looks, he looks even more like Clark Gable or Cesar Romero than ever (on the left in the lowermost photo).
May 17th, 2020 at 5:03 pm
Boomers will remember Craig Hill from the late ’50s series “Whirlybirds.” He also made several Spaghetti Westerns, benefitting from a resemblance to the popular Franco Nero and Terence Hill.
May 17th, 2020 at 5:21 pm
His role in DEADLY DUO was so close to that of a PI that all the while I was watching it I was wondering to myself how well he would have fit in with one of those clean-cut private eye shows such as SUNSET STRIP, SURFSIDE 6 or BOURBON STREET BEAT. He had the looks but maybe his range of acting ability wasn’t wide enough.
May 17th, 2020 at 7:46 pm
Hill did a couple of Eurospy films too. I remember him mostly from SURFSIDE SIX and WHIRLBIRDS.
Lowery still looked pretty good playing the sleazy governor chasing after Maureen O’Hara in his last film, McCLINTOCK.
Richard Jessup did everything from mainstream (CINCINATTI KID) to the Monty Nash spy series as Richard Telfair, to Westerns (CHUKA), most of his books are at least worth a read, so it is a good bet the book worked better than the film seems to.
May 17th, 2020 at 10:18 pm
Robert Lowery’s last film was The Ballad Of Josie, from 1967 (four years after McClintock! (1963)).
In Josie, Lowery played Doris Day’s drunken husband, whom she kills in self-defense at the beginning of the movie, setting the plot in motion. (Coincidentally, Josie was also Doris Day’s last theatrical film – she went into TV the following year.)
By the bye, Lowery came to Josie directly from a season’s engagement as the designated villain on Ann Sheridan’s Western comedy, Pistols ‘N’ Petticoats – but that’s another story …
May 17th, 2020 at 11:18 pm
At one time I was trying track down viewable copies of PISTOLS N PETTICOATS on DVD, only because I’d learnd Ann Sheridan was in it. I think I found someone who had copies to offer, but at the time, the price was too high. I didn’t realize that Lowery was in it also. Now I see that Amazon is selling an unclear number of episodes on two DVDs, very cheaply. Maybe you get what you pay for, but I’m thinking about it.
May 18th, 2020 at 8:11 am
It’s a given in horror films that the monster must be more interesting than the nominal hero, but in things like HOUSE OF HORRORS, THE MUMMY’S GHOST, and THE MONSTER AND THE APE, Robert Lowery carried dullness to extremes. Even his BATMAN is numbingly bland.
As he aged though, his face took on character, even as the parts grew smaller but more interesting, and he handled them with the authority of an actor who has seen it all and has no illusions.
November 19th, 2020 at 5:04 pm
I watched this last night. It could have been a good thriller, but ended up being more of a turgid soap opera